Aloha, Bro!

The Surfer Dude is moving back to his home place, and that old saying about not being able to go home again simply isn’t true in his case. I knew, when I suggested he spend a few months back home last fall to see if he would really enjoy living there again so many years later, that he was almost certainly going to discover he would; and I was right, damn it. It took him a couple of months to say it out loud to us cold-climate types, but there you have it; and soon he’ll be off. I doubt, once he’s there, that he’ll often look back. If he does, for a good part of the year the blizzards we’re enduring will obscure his vision, and he’ll shiver with the memory and thank his lucky stars that he no longer has to shovel snow as he tosses out his flannel-lined trousers and puts on a new pair of shorts. 

Change sucks, but it also means adventure. In this instance, the Surfer Dude is going to have the great adventure of returning to the land and landscape he loves, to extended family and old, long-time friends, of rebuilding and revisiting friendships and places and activities that were once so close to him they were in his pocket, but over the long years he’s lived away have became a part-time reality in a mature mind whose center of life was elsewhere, and very different. The sucky part for the Surfer Dude is that he’s leaving behind Glorious Us – and we are quite glorious. That means a lot – his home place is so distant that, unless he comes back here for a visit, he’ll probably never see most of Us again in the flesh – which, with modern technology, is still sad, but not mind-blowingly so. Even so, Glorious Us will move out of his pocket and into a treasure chest he looks into from time to time; but we’ll no longer be a daily part of his reality, we’ll no longer know what he’s thinking and doing day to day, and quite soon the strands of connection will be mostly memory threads and heart strings of affection, rejuvenated from time to time by emails and photos from a place I, at least, have never seen in person.

What he’ll gain is his return to the place that speaks, in a deep and secret and sacred way, to his bones and his soul. I get that - once, long ago, I gave up the potential of a really nifty job with hardly a second glance because I couldn’t bear the thought of being long removed from the shadow of the mountain I grew up near, the murmur of the trees, the bones of the terroir that nurtured my bones, and the small towns where I felt always a level of comfort I don’t feel in larger places. When you have land love, you have it deep in the pit of your belly, and sooner or later you have to give in to it or spend your life slightly off, always.

 

Even though I get it, and have been secretly rooting for him to give in to the mystical tug on his heart, I find myself tearing up every so often. Parts of my life, too, will change when he departs, and change sucks, as well as bringing adventure that I can’t see into yet.

The Surfer Dude and I are colleagues; we spend our working days in adjacent spaces in a shared office suite. There used to be three of us - two sisters and a brother; but our sister took off on her own adventure a couple of years ago. I still miss her, but with my bro in the office, it didn’t seem too bad. Now it seems like a chasm has opened at my feet that’s not likely to disappear.

It’s not that I mind being left behind – I’m in my home place, after all, so where else would I go? I don’t crave a change of venue – the mountain still looms over me, and the rocks and trees and waters of this place feel like family. But that’s the thing – family can be a whole lot of things, and a whole lot of people. These two people I worked near became family – we looked out for each other, we tried to make each others’ working lives easier, we treated each other when we were ill or in pain, and we listened to each other when a friendly ear was needed. We were more than work friends – the connection was deeper and more intimate – we were truly a kind of family. The connection was more than associational, it was in some way chemical, or maybe mystical.

We rarely saw each other outside the office; we weren’t that kind of friends – but we know things about each other, and share memories, that no one else does. Our affection for each other was familial – we lent rooms and linens and opinions and help freely, extended work days to treat each other, brought food in times of stress, ran errands and did favors and gave hugs and advice when we could. We were like happy siblings, often bumping into each other – literally – and happy to do so.

 

I’ve had a lot of different jobs over the years, and worked with a lot of different people, and always, always – well, almost always (there was that one lady who was certain I wanted her job, which I had no interest in doing and didn’t have the skill to do, anyway, rather than the job I had and enjoyed – working with her was, let us say, more interesting than I cared for) - all the folks I’ve worked with or near have been friendly and comfortable; and with some, friendships developed that continued for many years after one or the other of us left one place of work for another. Two work friends became special, life-long friends: the British Car Gal and I remain good friends decades after our last job together, and the Musician and I met at that same weird workplace where the British Car Gal and I met.

When we’re young I think we all accept the drifting away of some friends we made in school or college or work as part of life. Stuff happens: we move to a far coast, or another country, or marry and get sucked into a different set of friends, or change jobs and no longer keep the same hours or have the same days off. Affection remains, but over time, actual physical ties wear thin and often dissolve. We look backwards and ponder, “I wonder what happened to so-and-so? I wonder where that person’s living now?” and then we sigh, and smile, and go on with our own busy lives.

Now, for me – looking at life through my older eyes – to have spent many years working alongside two people who really settled into my heart as closer than friendly colleagues, who feel to me like a special kind of family – I recognize this has been a precious gift, and this last parting, of my bro to his home place, has brought tears to my eyes more than once. 

The office is still filled with charming, lovely, friendly people, but the energy – while still very good - is different, and there are ghosts haunting my days. A certain laugh that I listened for throughout the days has drifted away, the spontaneous sisterly hug that we intuited was needed is gone, and the footsteps I hear in the hallway outside my door are different footsteps. When I whistle on my way down the hall, I’m not sure anyone now is glad to hear it. 

Aloha, Bro. Safe journey. I’ll look forward to seeing pictures of you in the sun, especially when the north wind’s blowing here and the wolves are howling at the door in the dead of winter. Just don’t rub it in! 

And if you ever find yourself in need of a mid-winter snowball, I'm your gal. Fed Ex and I will be on it in a flash.

Artwork and photo by Deb Marshall.   For the blog, July 30, 2017.