Grief feels like homesickness, a word that doesn't get used much these days, an undefinable longing for bygone days, for a time that no longer exists, for former glories and even miseries. Is there any more shopworn thought than to return to the innocence moments before a bad diagnosis, an unlucky turn of events, financial collapse and the despairs over affairs of the heart? I think not. We can seldom appreciate a thing while it is happening -- only in retrospect do we get the strange pleasure of reliving our joy, perhaps, sadly enough, because it over. How, David, asks in the Psalms, can I sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land? Such is our lot, even if we never part from where we came from because, of course, the place is always parting from us, changing, shutting us out from what we know.
Summer always makes me feel this way, particularly its end with the back to school commercials, all those sharpened pencils, each year a new way of being which never held -- before long, the pencils became dull, my resolutions to be a different person failed in the light of who I am and will always be, a girl with matted hair and bad handwriting, a good reader of books, but never social groups, a person destined to be picked last for sports. Remember that fun ritual? Even so, I look back with a kind of twilight sadness for such hope, the ability to believe in something as redemptive as the first day of a new school year.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
“Don't have a fall back, because if you do, you'll fall back.” Mary-Louise Parker
Cocktail Hour
Love the Mary Louise Parker link from Jason on the comments section!
Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!
4 comments:
You went back to Texas, didn't you?
I was never a nostalgic person when I was younger. But I always recalled the sad times, relived them over and over. Now I've grown more nostalgic, and try to forget the rough times more. Most days I succeed. Some days the failure is spectacular.
Homesickness is like grief, I never get homesick and I shun grief as too self consuming. What's the purpose in either? Now anger I understand and indulge in.
I think I will just sharpen the pencils and stick them in my eyes and ears and not worry about it.
Lovey, weren't we just the most hopeful little things with our marchmallo-new tennis shoes and yummy smelling paper folders and Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencils? Hopeful and eager in September, and bored and tired in June. xoxo
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