In Between Place

Airplanes provide a perfect ‘in between realities’ break: I’m not home, I’m not on vacation, I’m not at work, I’m not with anybody, but I’m not alone. I’m not really anywhere, I’m somewhere else instead.

I was just flying over some rugged young mountains with snow gleaming from their eastern slopes. Now what I’m seeing out the little porthole windows of my row is almost perfectly flat. I see iced-over ponds and lots and lots of square lots: a grid of roads dividing square properties with square buildings on them. Luckily there are also crazy winding rivers slashing across the whole white scene. Maybe it just snowed. I have seen no human activity, just our grid system laid out like a good Roman would love. If not for the gnarly rivers this mid-winter, midwestern scene could practically be a huge pristine piece of graph paper, punctuated by a square building in the corner of every square lot.

I am flying from one Washington (the state) to the other Washington (the district) on my way back home to Europe. I look forward to getting back to my cozy home in Paris mostly because I want to unpack. I want to bring my wardrobe up from storage and I want to make a big pot of pea-soup to eat for the whole week.

But otherwise, I don’t know what I want to do. Seeing my son after several months, for the first time in a while the other day, he asked me what my plans henceforth will be. I truthfully told him that my plans ended that day, as I had shown up at my sister’s big party. It was fun…. we danced, we ate, I met cousins and old friends, and people told me how great my sister and I both are. Nothing not to like. But after that I have no plans.

Luckily, I have a small online job teaching Chinese French people to speak English. It amounts to a half dozen hours a week (though I spend more time preparing). The pay is not sustaining, but the human engagement is. So that is an anchor. I look forward to my morning walk with my friend every day, though it must be confessed that when she doesn’t bully me into getting up and warmly dressed every morning to meet her out on the city sideway, I simply don’t leave my 450 square feet. Sloth is in fact a deadly sin.

Nobody ever feels sorry for anybody who gets to live in Paris. And yet one can’t live on beautiful architecture alone. I am tempted to do so but I can’t. Even Netflix and wine aren’t enough to give my life purpose. Thank God I am healthy enough to need something else to get me up in the morning.

We in America have moved up from the daily struggle to survive (at least some of us have), now we want our communities to thrive as well (mind you – as herd animals – we probably always have wanted that). It hurts to see the homeless struggling.

Each of us acknowledges that it hurts to see them – some of us feel sorry for them, some of us feel angry at them, some of us feel shame from their existence or our own. Probably all of us want to help somehow – but we really don’t know how. Of course, our system is wrong to allow this poverty amidst plenty. Of course it is. But we don’t agree on what is needed to be done. Give them all jobs? Give them all homes? Ship them all off to somewhere ‘else’? Blame them, dread them, invite them into our own homes (can’t do that – it’s too scary!). And thus our fear thrives even if we don’t.

We hide in our jobs or our gated communities, our schools or our sports teams – if the Buffalo Bills win a football game I have a good day….Even while my neighbors freeze and the climate changes; even while our ‘democratically’ elected representative government lies to us on the regular, steals from us in order to line their personal country clubs’ pockets; until we lose our grip on what the truth even is, on what truly ‘represents’ us; on who the hell “we” are.

Its got to the point where ‘we’ hardly even exists. So we go to our jobs, collect our pay, believe we are sliding down the highway of life – but really we are losing our connections to life. Who am I, who are you? Where did ‘WE’ go? The Zulu language has a word “ubuntu” which I believe means “I am because we are because you are” ….We need a word like that in English.

I am now flying over clouds – those white puffy cushions that look like we should be able to stride through and over them as if they were a bouncy castle. And yet for all their soft rain-making obscure splendor – when you are in the midst of a cloud it just looks foggy and messes up your visibility. I’ve had a fabulous trip visiting my family all over this great big land… They are each doing well, and we still love each other – So I am one of the lucky Americans who really has a community (even though we mostly connect on Zoom). This means everything to me! And yet I am happy to be going back to my tiny little apartment in my big beautiful, anonymous city.

Am I really willing to give up all my American scrappy ‘family first’ grind for the restrained, civilized, anonymous European safety net within its highly taxed legal system?

I seem to be.