News That Stays News

A 10¢ Kaleidoscope Aimed at the Sun April 12, 2013

Leaving your home for the antipodes can be quite a shock.  It stirs any soul, and in the process dredges muck from even the deepest.  My friends have led and still lead very different lives, the details of which, along with much of which we spoke at length, I do not care to advertise or publish in any save blent and fragmented form: magpies that look like flying skunks and sound like electronic distortion, koalas nestled in the forks of trees and the friendly locals who point them out.  I learned to bite an apple and spit the pieces back out into [my own] sandwich, to give it the right consistency in a pinch.  I saw one of the osage oranges we played under as children, roped off as a hazard (falling fruit!)  I learned to juggle two balls in one hand, and was advised to pick up on the other right away, lest their skills diverge.  I saw a man hold his rage and improbable joy in check as he drove home in spite of a pretty vicious cut in his skull his partner had just left there through no fault of her own, and as ‘My Girl’ wafted from the radio.

My friends are goofy, and they are thoughtfully committed to some pretty serious choices they’ve made.  By and large, they seem to be at peace with the sheer untameability of fate, and the choices they will make when at times it turns against them.  We spoke of parents, and children.  Sitting on a wooden bench among the eucalyptus, on stone in a fake rainforest or on a wooden railing above a real one, and at times, staring into the distant sea, we considered the sacrifices one makes for the family one wants to belong to, and the blind leap one makes in trying to work for a community one never can belong to.

I greeted my friends with hugs, and parted with smile, with a handshake, with 三人行，必有我师 and with на здоровье.  I climbed halfway up a six hundred year old volcano through what looked for all the world like a field of charcoal-stained grape nuts and then summited vicariously, as the gulf sped away beneath me.  I waved goodbye to an age-old friend’s silver toyota, and walked away.