At Home

i think the accomplishment of the summer that i'm most proud of is all the reading i've done. at school i read christ and culture and the scandal of the evangelical mind and the first half of warranted christian belief (with david jones) and prince caspian and winnie-the-pooh, not to mention essays and occasional blogs and emails, as well as papers for my research. since i've been home i've read the wonderful wizard of oz and cheaper by the dozen, both for the first time, and the phantom tollbooth, not at all for the first time, which are all three delightful books. also, i watched nicholas nickleby with the gang (rob picked it), and pirates of the caribbean for the fourth or fifth time--a wonderful, well-executed, and inspiring movie, even speaking as a boy with no great love for disneyland. and there were quite a few movies at school, too, several of them quite worth seeing (i still really want to see the second half of spirited away). all in all, i'd have to say that's a pretty good haul for one summer, and better than i had any right to expect.

i've also started sight-reading whatever music we have around the piano, as i usually do after i've been home for a little while. hymns, showtunes and etudes, and when i get bored i start adding sevenths and dotted rhythms or switch it into minor. it helps that my family has the best electric piano i have ever played anywhere, with the exception of my grandparents' house, and that's only because theirs is almost identical. the piano was a christmas gift from grandpa years ago, and its bench is my favorite place in the house, the place that feels most like home, most spontaneous and relaxing and secure. in that seat i have violins and vibraphones and voices under my direction, and i have endless jokes with myself and with my family (this afternoon i played "do re mi" on a jazz scale and "we shall overcome" as a dirge), and operettas to invent with rob, and the endless quiet discipline (which i've never mastered) of scales and study. sightreading from the orange classics book, especially when it gets dark and the lamps come on, reminds me powerfully of high school--the winter nights (in bellingham, winter starts in october and winter nights start at about four in the afternoon, so about half the year seems to consist in winter nights) when i would play from the same book, and with it the feeling of structured time, order, direction, certainties, leading youth group and working at the library and waiting for buses in the rain.

which of course makes me think about Home and Place--the constant themes in the past three years since stanford and the past eight since morelos. when i flew out of san jose, i recognized all the surrounding geography--the suburbs (though they all look alike) and the bridges and the bay and the soft wrinkled tan ridges, and point reyes and tomales bay sort of in the distance--i knew their names, but also they were places that meant something to me, that conjured images and smells and feelings. and it struck me as i descended a couple hours later into sea-tac that i didn't know puget sound geography nearly so well as i know san francisco bay, despite having lived two summers in seattle and seventeen years in bellingham. as we banked into the descent i completely lost my bearings--i didn't even know what direction i was facing (except that it couldn't be east since i didn't see mount rainier).

and while i left the santa cruz mountains, a snatch of a song i once heard had come unbidden to mind: "these are my mountains; this is my home".

this is very strange to me.

being home (by which at the moment i mean being in bellingham) is wonderful--lots of reunions and sleeping in and being with my family and of course the piano, but i also feel a little out of place. i'm in a place i haven't been since christmas, and not for longer than a couple weeks at a time for about two years. my room has been home to two (three?) boarders in that time. the two pets we had are both gone, and a new dog is in their place. many of my friends are already back at school. brian is in mexico (though he'll be back in a week), and elizabeth went and became a sophomore in high school some time when i wasn't looking, cut her hair short, and started going by "liz". my church is in a new building (i got lost when i tried to drive to it last week), and my little town is growing up with new housing complexes and parking lots and thirty-five zones. i don't think me and toto are in kansas anymore.

and i'm the worst of it. i'm allergic to the closed up dusty houses, and can hardly remember to bring kleenex with me when i go out. i've been cold all the time, and when it rains (every other day or so, though everyone tries hard to convince me that the summer was beautiful until i arrived) i feel like going out would shrivel me up, and i wouldn't even consider biking through that sprinkling deluge. the brave and hardy pioneer of old is gone--

Where now the bike and rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helmet and raincoat, and the tail light glowing?

--to paraphrase Tolkien.

you'd think a person would get used to changing, or at least get resigned to it. but i've been changing for twenty-one years, and other people for a lot longer than that, and neither phenomenon seems remotely natural to me. and the prospect that the next year, the next two years, the next three years at the very least, will be chock-full with the worst kinds of changes--homes and vocations and relationships--well, i can't say i like it. not one bit.

i think i'd give up and just move back to ... to somewhere, and work in the children's library forever and live in my basement and fend off would-be boarders with a lego arsenal, except

except for the thing that i can't express without falling back on quotations, but fortunately i have many to turn to--these thoughts are nothing beyond what is common to my age and station. like natalie recently spake, "uncertainties behind, uncertainties before...and what does it all come down to? holy." or tina: "i know i'm confused...but at the end of the day i can rest assured..." or the writer of hebrews: "by faith ... abraham obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going." a friend asked me yesterday if i was worried about the future. she called my answer a cop-out, but it's the only answer i've got. yes i'm scared, but i know him who holds the stars. in the words of the old hymn:

"Let not your heart be troubled,"
His tender word I hear,
And resting on His goodness
I lose my doubts and fears.
Though by the path He leadeth
But one step I may see,
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me.

this seems like a fitting inauguration to the upcoming year.

so much for brief.