Dear blog-reader,
I guess it only makes sense that I start out with a blog note about leaving (and by "only makes sense" of course I mean that it makes no sense whatsoever!). But that's where I stand at this moment, or really that's where I sit; on a bed, gazing out the window of the room that I once regarded as my own. And even though you have not, cannot, and will not ever see what I see right now, you should know that you have been, are, and will always be a part of it. Let me explain....
(Although my blog is titled "FoodGrooves" - one I had hoped to dedicate to talking about the two things that inspire me most: food and music - I must say that this particular entry may be lacking in each subject. Also, perhaps I should have started by saying a bit about myself. But hey, let's just see where this goes, shall we? Ha, that reminds me of the lyrics of a Dan Bern song: "Don't ask me what kind of music I'm gonna play tonight. Just stay a while, see for yourself a while..." <---fyi, things like this may happen....)
....My house is pretty empty at the moment, my family has all but moved out completely. We are moving/moved to Lake Orion, a pretty decent distance away from our old house in Hartland. It is a move I'm completely down with, too! It's sooo much more convenient for my mom and dad, work-wise, and it is something much more within our means, space and income-wise. Plus it doesn't really matter to me because I'll still be living up in East Lansing for (at least) another year. It all happened kind of fast actually, my parents pretty much stumbled upon a little fixer-upper lake house for rent and pretty much said, "we'll take it!". The next thing I know, I come home to see my refrigerator sailing out my back door on a dolly ("well, so much for this soy milk, huh?"). And from there it was one piece of furniture after another, the fridge, the tables, the couches, the beds, and eventually, the cat (I knew that day that my parents would "officially" move into the new house would be the day my cat made the move.) It felt kinda weird though because most of our furniture wasn't going to the new house, for it wouldn't fit. So we sold it all, mostly on craigslist, to the first people who claimed it. Just today, I watched a pair of heavyset middle-aged men in their pj's waddle out of my garage with my washing machine (I assumed theirs had busted and they had ran out of clean shorts?).
(I know I haven't followed through on my explanation from the first paragraph yet, but hang in there!...)
So now I sit in my room (or at least in the room that once was). My bed is still here, my dresser, and my book shelf, albeit all with little post-it price tags on them, but really nothing distinguishably mine still remains. Over the past month-and-a half I've thought about whether or not I'm really going to miss this place. And ya know for a while, I honestly could not think of anything that I'm really going to be broken up about. It's just a house filled with stuff. So yeah, I didn't really feel any attachment to anything I saw, at least until recently, when I pulled up the blinds....
So there's this window....
A dual-panel x-by-y frame, through it a scene looking out onto the southwestern horizon. My favorite view of the house. When I opened up the panels to let the air in, I opened my eyes, ears, and mind to something I had until now failed to realize. Out my window I saw my playground. I saw where I had fallen first and where I picked myself up. Out my window I saw where I made some of the biggest mistakes of my life as well as some of the best. I heard the music out my window, the prelude begins with the echo of cars in the distance, a fluttering of twirps and tweets in the windswept tree branches (I hate swallows), the humming of a neighbor's Cub Cadet. Then my senses heightened, I heard the voices of my friends, some of them old, some new, such song-worthy soundings surround the soul of so simple a sight as this. We were fools, we were heroes, we built this town and tore it down, promised to never promise, and the first rule was always "no rules". This window held my gaze in its arms and knew I had to see what it was waiting for me to see, I had to hear what it had been waiting for me to hear, I had to be here at least once, just to remember, to realize, and reassemble myself. Time stood still in that evening air, the sun was mid-set, the air was Claratin clear, and would you believe it, the rain was a no-show! I'm going to miss that window.
It's not the moving that's hard to get past. It's not even the change of scenery. We're humans, we adapt to change with incredible ease, I mean incredible ease! Gas prices, fad diets, relationships, networking formats. Can you remember the previous Facebook format before the last "update"? Neither can I, and I think I even joined one of those "this sucks! petition to bring back the old facebook!" things! But sooner than we expect, the protesting groups move on ("Rebel scum"- as Emperor Palpatine would phrase it), we adapt, we embrace the change, we pay $4.15/gallon, we eliminate "bad cholesterol", we switch to FB chat, because whether or not we realize it at first, these things aren't the changes we really care about. The change we really care about is in ourselves (as horribly preachy as that sounds!). In basic physiology (oh god...) one of the first things students learn is the concept of homeostasis, and how the body's central focus is maintaining a level of internal harmony and balance. Any change, physical or psychological (unless you're a dualist!<--wow, hello philosophy!?) has a chance of shifting this balance to some degree, so we do all that we can to resist change, initially, until we become comfortable with our new environment to compensate and eventually reset the harmony.
But the problem is we can't see into the future. We like who we are right now. We know how we got here, and we love reliving the journey whenever we desire a good dose of nostalgia, and so we hold on to those moments in our past outside our bedroom windows. The nightmares that haunt us most are the ones where we return to those moments only to find that everything we thought we loved is gone, and we're left alone and confused without so much as a hand to guide us. I think that these are really just challenges, daring you to go ahead and return to those moments, return to those places, and see if you still don't feel at home again. But more importantly, it's an invitation back to those feelings, a high school reunion of your favorite flavors if you will, and after tasting those flavors again, you realize that they aren't as unfamiliar as you feared, they've been with you the whole time. You've just been building on them, adding some new spices while maintaining the same original character. But there's always going to be something left behind, and there should be. Just as we gain something new with each big change, we leave something in return, a little trail of breadcrumbs, perhaps even a little horcrux of our own(1 more day!!!!), something personal that only we share with ourselves and that moment in time and even though we may never relive those exact moments again, we console ourselves in knowing that we still can feel the laughter, we can still taste the wind, and we can still hear that music.
Windows like this are one of kind and yet we all have one: the kind where when you look out, you're really looking in, and the harder we look, the more of ourselves we come to find. Perhaps the greatest characteristic that these paradoxical panes of glass possess is that they all are connected to one another. We each have our place in the window of another. That is, at least from my point of view (window pun), why you are such a critical element in my window. You're more than just a blog reader to me because no matter where I move to, east, west, north, south, it doesn't matter. In a way, we've always shared a window view. And if you're ever lost out there, don't worry, there's always a place for you just outside my window.
Dan
