Goodbyes and Hellos

Yesterday my parents signed the final papers, selling the house I grew up in.  Then they finished packing the moving van and moved back to the family land in Alabama.  They’ll be within walking distance of my sister and various aunts and uncles, but now they’ll be a three-hour drive from me, instead of a three-minute drive.  The house my father designed and built with his own two hands, with my five-year-old handprint in the cement of the foundation, is now owned by someone with no knowledge of or connection to my family.

This would be a deeply introspective (and, no doubt, poignant) post on saying goodbye, if yesterday was not also a day of saying hello:  my son William was released from the NICU and finally came home.  No doubt I will process my goodbyes slowly (and privately) in the weeks and months to come, but for now, everything is burned away by the blazing sun of having my family of four together for the first time:  my sons have finally met each other.

Daniel was waiting at the door when we arrived.  We’d been telling him about his baby brother Will for a couple of months, but we weren’t sure how much his not-quite-two-year-old mind understood.  As I guessed, he immediately started exclaiming “Baby!  Baby!” when he saw William, but what I hadn’t guessed was how gentle and affectionate he would be.  He quickly learned his name was Will (he pronounces it “Eel”), and patted and hugged him repeatedly.

In times of transition like these, one can choose to look to the past or look to the future.  I've chosen the latter.

I watched Napoleon Dynamite with my wife again a couple of nights ago. It's hard to believe it's ten years old - and that that puts it at the halfway point between the present and my senior year of high school. I love the movie; I'm able to laugh at a character that clearly bears an uncomfortable resemblance to my own high-school self, at least in his emotional experiences, if not necessarily in other ways. I always wonder how my classmates experienced high school. Was it fun for them? Painful? Boring? I see my own experiences reflected in Napoleon: awkward, uncertain, socially inept, confused about the world, vaguely aware of social status but not really understanding how it worked, feeling threatened by bullies and desperately holding onto the friends I knew I could trust. The strongest memories are often the most ambiguous: emotionally charged but unresolved. Did I miss an opportunity there? Or did I successfully avoid making a horrible blunder? Did I stand my ground in self-respect? Or did my stubbornness make a bad situation worse? It's hard to say; my memories are incomplete recollections of situations I didn't really understand in the first place. Friday night sitcoms told me situations should be quickly resolved, with a lesson learned all around, but for me, situations were left in an open-ended limbo, sometimes for months or even years before they were revisited, and the only lesson was that of patient endurance until I could graduate and leave my past behind for a college where nobody knew me.