roots

so like i said i've been wanting roots for a long time.

or to be more precise, what comes from roots.

fruit.

i want fruit trees.

blueberrys like in grandmas yard

blackberries by the fence

loquats and kumquats

hell even a fig or two, and I never ate those as a kid.

for 15 years i've moved place to place

never longer in one apartment than about 20 months with KP in Opelika

dreaming of a nice house

a quiet car to drive to the theatre

and enough money to eat good food and buy books

but each place has been temporary

with D&G in a spare room
in dorms
with T&T chasing rats and throwing darts
cold wet english dorms
sunny opelika
mother in law's
roommates at A's university
flat by the trains in Woking
and by the trains in Leatherhead
in J's spare room in Virginia, driving weekends to Boston
apartments in Fairfax knowing moves were coming for both A and I
and to Texas, next to a nice grocery store

total lawns mowed: 1

I turn 35 this year, and the closest friends I've had are very far away. I talk to them much less than I'd like to, and am often ashamed by how little I know of their daily lives. All our lives are only to get more complicated and busy in the years ahead.

That scares me.

Several months ago, when my parents first came to visit me here, I wanted to take them out for dinner. I realized I only ever went to a few restaurants. That's all I had ever done anywhere except Auburn and Foley, the two places I had considered homes. Every other town was temporary, passing through. Waiting for the place where the careers and the partners and the friends and family all came magically together.

Several weeks ago, I realized that if I wanted to be able to entertain people when they came here, that I needed to get to know the city myself. It is fun to visit a city when you know someone who lives there... really lives there. Not someone who hangs out in their apartment and kills time waiting for a better tomorrow. I found the new Zagat survey for Texas restaurants, Zagat that I had come to love in Washington. Friends from work came down on business expenses, I could entertain them. I found a storyline for adventuring into the city.

Several days ago, I was sitting in my car on a Sunday afternoon. Garrison Keillor was on the radio, a rerun of the previous day's Prairie Home Companion. I remembered how 13 years earlier I sat in my car on a warm day in Auburn, outside the Post Office, love letter in hand to send to A, but waiting to hear the end of Prairie Home Companion because you could actually get good reception in that parking lot. How I had thought then that if there was something good, soul-affirmingly good (like M&M) about the world, and about America (which I was considering leaving), this was it. And how years later, after September 11, when so much of what I had grown up loving, fiercely, fiercely, about the United States was being sullied and perhaps destroyed, when my love for the country was feeling increasingly like an unrequited love for an illusion, how it was then that I heard Garrison Keillor speak, as Jimmy Carter had spoken, about the fundamental decency and goodness of the country not in fearful, hateful, selfish terms, but as something precious that must be protected not by guns but by the voices of people not afraid to speak truth to power and prejudice. And hearing that voice on a Sunday afternoon, as cars from the mega-church filled cafeteria parking lots, I thought how I wished I had seen him perform in person. And then wishing fulfilled, hearing that he would speak to the Progressive Forum in Houston.

Several days ago I sat twenty feet from him, and his spirit filled me with the hope that (paraphrasing I think John Adams wishes) our country would be honorable and successful, but failing that, honorable. Walking from dinner to the performance hall, I passed the city theatre, the Alley Theatre, and remembered Sundays in Atlanta to see musicals. I haven't listened to a new musical I liked in years, but I loved those trips, and the dream of a life filled with unimagined wonders. Yet in 10 years in the suburbs of London and Washington, I had seen fewer plays than any one year as a college student in Auburn or Manchester. I bought season tickets later that night.

Several hours ago I got a phone call that the life of an aunt I love was in danger. Five hours earlier I walked back from lunch in the new heat, thinking that in life it is important to know what you want, but to plan based on what you expect. I said, "for example, I hope nobody I love ever dies, and I've been very lucky that I've lost almost no loved ones my entire life. But I would be foolish to believe and plan that nobody ever would." I thought of this as A had spoke to me of her worry about presenting her work, and how she hoped being left off a presentation list wasn't a jinx. I thought, you accept the fear that bad things can happen, but then move on to what you can do to make matters better. And that there was no such thing as jinxes.

Five hours later I was thinking of jinxes again.

Wishing I could do something to make things better.

Hating that my job, which indirectly keeps me away from those I love, is acutely doing so now.

Not knowing who to call.

Not so interested in the political scandal of the day or stock prices.

Wanting to hear how everyone was. Wanting to sit in the waiting room and get someone coffee. More thankful than is rational that T wants to have coffee at the airport tomorrow.

With A asleep in London, and the Alabama contingent manning the phones, I sat to reading Tiny Cat Pants and was impressed not just by how consistently Aunt B can open her mind to people, but also by how effectively she has knit together a community of strangers and not-so-strangers across different geographic, age and political distances.

One post that got my attention involved those who say that "all we can do is pray", and the response that more is asked than prayer - action is required. And I think of Oprah's statement (that I'm not sure I fully agree with but anyway) that it is not Love but Courage that is most valuable, because without courage love does nothing.

Action, love, courage, community. Things I believe in, things I'm trying more every day to live.