Them

My family moved back to the Upper Valley tonight.

I saw them all a week ago, and so they weren’t new as they climbed off the bus, a family of only six right now instead of nine. I forgot that the friends waiting for them with me hadn’t seen them for almost a year.

It was strange, waiting at the bus station to pick up my family, piling them and all their luggage into our cars, and driving them to dinner and then to a hotel. It was equally weird leaving them at the hotel and driving back to what has become my house. I was a little disconcerted, while I washed the dishes at home, to think that in about another week I will be moving back in with my family and giving up the freedom of only taking care of myself that I’ve grown so used to, and to find that I was a little apprehensive about that.

What was strangest of all, though, was thinking of my family as “them” instead of “us”.

Their collective experiences this past year are very different than my individual ones, and because of that for the first time I feel a little like an outsider. They don’t know how I spend my days, or who the people I talk with my friends about are. They weren’t the ones I told when my car refused to start again last night. But neither do I know their friends, or their daily routines, or what happened to them yesterday. Strangest of all, I don’t get their jokes anymore. For the first time in my life, when my sisters look at each other, say something in unison, and then laugh uproariously, I don’t understand.

I don’t know what to think about that.

Chester

My car's name is Chester. My little brother would jump down my throat if he knew my car had a name, but I wasn't the one that named him. Chester got his name from my not-as-little brother and his girlfriend, and I inherited Chester and his name when that brother went gallavanting off to Europe. (In case you're wondering, I'm not speaking to him anymore.) Chester is a dark blue Toyota Camry who is the same age as my 16 year old brother, and he has the distinction of being my first car, so I am extremely attached to him.

Unfortunately, Chester has become tempermental in his old age. Yesterday was the fourth time that he has simply refused to start, which is not only inconvenient, but gives me that lost, panicky feeling that I get when I miss an exit on the highway or spend too much time alone in the house without seeing another person. Chester's new tendency not to start is not improving our relationship.

I was talking with a friend last night about her car, which I borrowed until Chester decided to work again, and in between showing me where the lights and the windshield wipers were she said, "Don't worry if it rattles. I don't know why it does that, but I just ignore it." I said ok, and we moved on to which side the gas tank is on, but after a minute or two we realized how stupid our optimistic attitudes toward car trouble are. Why do I think it's ok to just ignore the rattling sound, or the check engine light, or the lack of oil in the car? My general response to these things is just a vague idea that it will all "work out" somehow.

Then, of course, Chester refuses to start some day and I actualy have to face the fact that he's not just going to magically repair himself.

The funny part about all this is that I treat other things the same way that I treat mysterious rattling noises. My silly notion that somehow everything will just be ok gets applied to relationships and plans too. It's so easy to just ignore the little warning signals that I don't really understand until suddenly something goes completely wrong and refuses to work anymore.

The big problem in all of this is that I really hate taking responsibility for anything. I never feel capable enough to deal with things, and so I write them off as not being my problem, or just assume that someone else will take care of them and they will all be ok eventually. But something that Mother Teresa said has started to become very real to me lately. She said, "If we do not have peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other".

If we really belong to each other, then everyone's problems are my problems, and my problems are everyone else's problems. I'm not sure I always like this, but I think it's what Jesus has called me to. He has called me give up my life in the sense that I can put my plans or my wants aside and deal with the problems that arise in other people's lives instead of just ignoring them. This is messy, and usually involves areas that I don't understand any more that I understand car mechanics and what to do when Chester refuses to start. But if I want things to work out, I need to actually do something, like consult a mechanic, and not just blindly hope that everything will be ok. Often it won't, at least not for a long time, and not until I have invested more time or money or discomfort than I ever would have wanted to.

Yet there's beauty in that. There's incredible beauty in the thought that we are all capable of pouring ourselves into each other's lives, and being so connected that we really do belong to each other. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have people in your life who listen to the little rattling sounds and not just the silence of an engine that won't start? That's what I want in my life.

I have invested a lot of money, time, worry, and tears into Chester in the last few weeks, and right now he's working again. I don't know how long it will last, but I think it's worth it.

Why my blogs never last

I'm going to try blogging again.

I don't really know why. This is at least my fourth attempt at a blog, and each previous attempt has ended miserably. I actually wrote a few good posts for a blog I started this past fall, but inevitably I begin to despise my blogging efforts, and I give up and delete everything. Sometimes I don't even get as far as the first post. Probably fifty percent of the time.

My biggest problem with blogging is that I like to sound clever. After posting anything, I spend several days re-reading what I've written and changing things. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but it tends to consume all my time, either because I'm so proud of what appears at the time to be an exceptionally brilliant post, or because I want to say something of substance but can't seem to actually find anything to say.

Another problem is that I get sentimental and post long strings of photographs that don't mean a thing to anyone but me.

I also have a habit of trying to incorporate favorite lines from songs into my posts, but usually they don't have to do with anything that I might actually say, and this is annoying. I spend far too much time trying to weasel in a connection between the line from the song and my thoughts, and I don't ever get very far.

However, despite all these problems, I continually yeild to the temptation of blogging, or at least creating my own space, full of my own thoughts, out in the
open for anyone to stumble upon (and hopefully be impressed by my cleverness).

Yet another friend of mine started blogging though, and here I am. My friends are excellent bloggers. My mother is a fantastic one. Surely, surely, so am I, I always think as I dig through my brain for another clever line from a song to serve as my username for yet another blog. Certainly, at least, I could learn to blog well with practice.

So here I go again. Perhaps the next time you come to read my not-as-clever-as-I-might-have-hoped thoughts, you will find that I have deleted this blog in frustracion, like its predecessors. But perhaps you will find that it's still here. Perhaps I really can learn with practice. I hope so.