"Real" life

On my way home from work today, I read this article in GQ, titled Boom. It was one of the more moving things I had read in awhile. I swear, the article wasn't shmaltzy, though it had pretty "heart-tuggy" passages. It was just raw, real and honest...and that's what was moving about it.

This passage in particular (the last bit of the piece):

"Shane always told me, 'If anything ever happens to me out there, you better fight till you're blue in the face,'" she says. Because if something ever happened to Shane, that meant something went wrong—something that shouldn't have gone wrong and shouldn't go wrong again—and usually it takes a judge and a jury to get that point across with any authority. "I want to be able to sit down with Blaine twenty years from now and tell him something really bad happened one night," she says, "but here are all the good things that came out of it. Here are the safety rules that changed, here are the regulations that changed."

But what does she tell him now? What does she tell a 3-year-old boy who'd just figured out that Daddy was gone when his truck was gone and Daddy was home when his truck was home, but now Daddy's truck is home and Daddy's not? What does she tell him when Blaine is playing with a toy John Deere and slips and bumps his arm and he's not really hurt but he's crying and he wants his Daddy? What does she tell him then?

She tells him the only thing she can think of. "Just raise your arm up toward the sky," she says, "and let Daddy kiss it."

And because Blaine is only 3, he believes her. So he raises his arm and says, "Thank you, Daddy," and sniffes away the last of his tears.

And, I was just sitting in my seat and I was just moved. Slightly teary, but most just jolted...like the way you perk up in your office chair just as your body loses its grogginess for the day.

And walking out of the terminal, I just wondered why. And this is what I thought.

It was just so real. It was honest. It wasn't manufactured, it was just a moment that really caught its own essence. It was like reality TV, except not on TV and actually reality.

And then I realized how sometimes we just want moments to be special, because we want them to mean something. Or mean something more...something that trancends the very moment that we're experiencing. There are times that we're deliberate about moments, we either make them happen or really focus on the fact that they happened.

But that moment, described in that article, was different. It was precisely real. Precisely real. Not just, "in the moment". It was REAL life.

As much as I like powerful, meaningful moments, it doesn't have to be like that. There's something about moments just as they are, that can be wonderful. They can be amusing, charming, emotional, funny or uncomfortable...just as they're supposed to be. And that they deliver exactly that breed of emotion - the real moment they're supposed to - makes them amazing in retrospect.

Those moments, though, are elusive...because it takes everything about the moment to be real, from the people to the context. It's like being silent with someone you love, in an elevator. The time that passes - all of 15 seconds - is almost naked and so binding...because those 15 seconds are exactly what they are supposed to be.

That begets the question, in my mind, what does it take to be real?

"The Lucky Ones"

Just fooling around with some words, a little bit...


And in their youth they hung off the precipice of what the world could be. Lining their dreams with magic and the begginings of things. Everything was dabbed with marinara sauce in those days. Optimism and iPods are how they made it through difficult evenings as they toiled away at building the world up again. The easy days were glorious.

It was uncertain what would happen as they aged. They did come of age in remarkably unstable times, afterall. Many of them had unfounded expectations, even though they practiced persistence. But their lives were good, as far as lives go. Others were lost - not necessarily in a physical way - and were the collateral damage of their generation. Unfortunately, nobody knows if it was necessary for it to be that way or if it could've been avoided.

The last of them did what they had set out to do...fixing the mistakes of their mothers and fathers. They had to make sacrifices and take unreasonable risks. They rebelled for the right reasons and were always tired, caffienated or both.

They were the lucky ones.

"Almost" stories

There's a day, coming in the indefinite future, where things will start to coalesce. It's a day where random occurences will contribute to a larger narrative, and won't be so random any more. "Almost" stories will complete themselves and become stories in their own right. Everything will fall into place, so to speak.


I imagine all this happening in a flurry, but I suppose I don't really know what it'll look and feel like. Maybe that day was yesterday. Maybe it'll be in 6-8 months.

Either way, I'm throwing a party shortly thereafter.

Thinking of camp.

On this 4th of July. I think of character. And character which is not shakeable, is not character at all. As a nation, as a tribe and as individuals. I've found it difficult lately to stay "centered" in this way. But at the same time, if we are not true to our character, all we have in this world is not true. So we must, whether it is painful to discover and exercise - or if is not.

This is what I learned at camp.