the weather.

I wasn't ready to come home. I really wasn't. When asked if I was excited, I kind of shrugged my shoulders, thinking the closer I got to landing, the more likely it would be for my heart to skip a bit. I understand, after having been gone from the land of the morning calm for one month, and by my clock, having already been greeted by the customs man one month and a few short hours ago, why I wasn't quite looking forward to what awaited me. 

I genuinely don't know what direction I want my life to go, and though I know I can do whatever I want, powerlessness rests in the fact that I am not quite sure what that is. And all of these questions and ultimatums were clouded with the fog of a foreign country, and the fact that I was doing something and experiencing something that most people will never get the opportunity to do.  

When I was driving home this past Sunday to eat pancakes with the parents, there was a layer of fog covering different phases of the earth. In the beginning, it hovered over the wet grass, and kept it from being the focal point. I could still see its greenness, but it didn't command my attention, because the mysterious beauty of the visible moisture in the air that's different and rare and only comes around sometimes...It stole the show. When I was in Korea, I was loving the fog.

Now, I must make choices. Today is cloudless, and I feel everything but adequate. 

pay-day.

Two things I overheard people saying this week:

At First Watch, a breakfast eatery in South Tulsa flooded with senior citizens, by a man amongst a group of men with silver hair filing to the back of the cafe, "Is someone sitting at our table?". And then, from one man to another with a cane, "how are you feeling this morning, Sid?"

At planned parenthood, from a young girl with flames on her tank top, as she filled out the mandatory forms, to her boyfriend, whose pants were struggling to stay above his waist, "Am I trying to get pregnant?" And later, when the boy ran into an old friend, the friend said, while doing the informal hand shake that ends as if the hands were sling shots, "Punk, what have you been up to?" to which the boyfriend replies, "well, I just got out of prison last month..." 

Three things I have passed over on the road or highway in the past twenty-four hours:

Last night, a metal ladder, lying diagonal in between two lanes of traffic, on a highway filled with six lanes of traffic. 

A few miles later, a brown boot. 

And this morning, on my way to work, a twin mattress abandoned on a sidewalk under an overpass. There was no one taking advantage of its comfort. 

I have to say, I am continuing to enjoy the benefits of not having to pay for my coffee. The honey wheat bagel I ate this morning was delicious. My right eye continues to twitch, a symptom of either lack of sleep or stress. In my case, I think it's both, as stress has inhibited my ability to get a good night's sleep. I think that's a conundrum, and I think today will be a good day. 

carry-out.

One day last week, I had a job. I peeled, de-cored, sliced and mashed about forty avocados. I cleaned dirty drawers and blended smoothies. I also portioned, weighed, and bagged chunks of pre-cooked chicken. By the end of the day, I was actually allowed to place the pre-arranged sandwiches on the panini grill, and set the timer. The highlight of my day, up to the point when I began to make Marilynn her smoothie, had been my walk to work. 

Marilynn's order was a carry-out, which means, basically, that she needed someone to...carry it out. I abruptly volunteered. She was apprehensive, and felt a little guilty, considering how busy we were, asking, "are you sure it's OK?". I assured her that I was the new girl, and quite dispensable, given the fact that up to this point, I was really only trusted with the smoothies.  She was grateful, and gracious, and though the walk to her car only took a few minutes, its details will remain with me indefinitely. We talked about the weather, and about how nice it was outside, and about her artificial hip, and how the rain always makes it just a little more painful. I told her about my rainy but enjoyable walk to work, and where I live. She was surprised by my walk, and its distance, so I told her about where I had just come from, and about how walking had taken me so many places over the past two months. She glanced at me with knowing eyes, and said, "so it's just a part of you right now"... I paused.

Yes. That's it, exactly.

The job was a blip on the radar. I was feeling desperate, and in need of employment. Walking to work was the plus, the draw, the decision maker. I hadn't put much thought into the actual work, or how the environment would differ from the one I had just left. When the boss was across from me offering me a position and a paycheck, I didn't acknowledge the possibility that the environment I was walking into could be quite torturous in comparison to the glorious challenges that had so recently come to an end.

I walked home, munching on a vegetable hummus pita, and I cried. 

I was thankful for Marilynn, and her effortless ability to articulate something that was resting at my core, in a way that even I had not been able to do. I was thankful that someone got it.  And then I decided that Wednesday was the last day I would walk to that job, and also that really, if walking is a part of me right now, I can walk any time I want, but that it shouldn't be the only reason I would continue to work somewhere that would make most every other hour of my work day miserable. 

Thursday, I drove the walking route and returned my shirt. Today, I am still looking for a job, and walking.

a trade.

10:16 AM

Two weeks ago, I was packing the contents of my life into a suitcase in Cheonan, South Korea, while trying to make it through the last season of Arrested Development. Two weeks from that day, today, I was in a kitchen in a deli mashing avocados in an oversized plastic tub. 

I write this on a break, to make sure I will believe it, in between reading Faulkner and munching on a chocolate chip cookie, while listening to "You Make My Dreams Come True" play through the speakers a few feet away. 

hindrance.

I am convinced. It's somewhere close to the great hindrance of human nature. It's that voice, nagging voice, that stays with us throughout our lives. I don't think it goes away, we just learn, hopefully, over time, how to manage it better.

My mother is a spectacular woman. One of the most giving people I have come across in my life. One of my favorite places to see her is in the company of her near-lifelong friends, the ladies that have known her since she was an awkward sixth grader, when she thought that the people in the small town she was relocating to rode their horses to school. There is no pretending when these women get together. They know too much about each other to be anything that they aren't. It's the environment that she is, arguably, most herself. And when one of these audacious friends says something that touches too close to home, or that catches her a little off guard, her in jest response that she also really means is, "shut the hell up". I have heard this phrase my entire life, and I hadn't really ever had any use for it, until now. 

I was having coffee with some friends the other day. I am currently unemployed, and I have found it enjoyable, if only for a week, to pretend that in life, jobs and income and responsibilities are some of those optional things in life. In light of that, brunches at eleven in the morning, coffee around three, and drinks in the evening, when the sun goes down, have added texture to this game I have been playing. In the midst of the game, good conversation is had, and one sentence that was said during the coffee conversation struck me funny then, and has stayed with me for days. "I am able to be myself." 

This, to me, is not good. An "ability" to be oneself. Someone somewhere giving you or I permission to be who we actually truly are. What would the world be like if it were full of people that weren't just able to be themselves, that weren't waiting for someone to tell them that they were pretty Okay, but rather rolled out of bed in the morning and said, "damn, it's good to be me."

And it's this voice, the one that may sound like your constantly disappointed father, when he told you all of the ways you actually mowed the yard wrong, instead of a simple thank you...or of your pastor, who convinced you somehow that God was disappointed in your humanness, your tendency to fail or mess up or give in to something you had always been told was wrong, and that in order to please Him, you must not do any of those things, ever. It could be the voice of a boss, or your own alter ego, or perhaps just a little devil that sits on your left shoulder, when the angel is nowhere to be found. Regardless of the dress or mannerisms or tone that this voice takes, I am, again, convinced. It's in all of us. It flares when we lose our temper and revert to childish ways, or when we pull out in front of someone, accidently, and they honk at us, and then flip us off. It flares in our relationships, when someone declines an invitation, and we somehow hear that we are actually pretty unlikeable as a whole, and not much fun to be around ever, or when we come up against really successful people, and hear them telling us, of course, how much of a failure we are. 

And it's this same voice that makes us believe that being ourselves is appealing, but not realistic. That being who we truly are is desirable, and something to aspire to, but not what would be best for humanity as a whole. And this is why I have found my mother's phrase so very helpful, because, despite my glowing personality and charm, I am not immune to this voice. It's just that, after years of the voice being the only thing I heard, I began to recognize it a little better.  And when I do, I borrow the wisdom of my mother and tell it to "shut the hell up."

the scoop.

It is one of those really great tragedies of life: The dangling of that which your heart most desires, right in front of you, just out of reach.

I am speaking of ice cream, of course.

The scooping of, rather. That’s the risk you take when you decide to put that responsibility in someone else’s hands.

I have to hold one hand down with the other when standing on the other side of the counter at an ice cream shop. I don’t blame the scoop. It knows its place.

If the scoop were to have a say, I truly believe it would be on my side. I have the tendency to converse with inanimate objects, and I think they respect me for this. Just this morning, I was speaking to my belt as I looped it around my waist. Inanimate objects. They get it, or as my friend Michael would say, “they know how to keep it real”.

Any scoop in charge of my ice cream would know how to keep it real. The scoop would say to me (maybe) something like, “I am sorry Meredith. Really, I am. I heard you say cookies and cream. You obviously want cookies with your cream. If I had a way to do the scooping myself, I would certainly get all the cookies within reach. Really, I would. But the situation is out of my hands, like, literally. I am actually in someone else’s. And they just don’t get it.”

I would thank the scoop for understanding. And then I would step back, force myself to avert my eyes away from the scooping process, and instead, scowl at the scooper. Why? Because it’s the cookies I really want. If it wasn’t, I would just order vanilla. Duh.

Instead, I am teased. I can see an abundance of deliciously sweet chocolaty and crunchy cookies. They are right in front of me, just out of my reach. I walk away with a waffle cone of mostly vanilla ice cream.

returns.

I am back to the world of multiple spoons, a consistently dry bathroom floor, and pulp in my orange juice. 

It was a long journey home. And I don't mean in the metaphysical sense. I mean in the hours-in-the-air-and-time-spent-in-airport sense. I was in two different countries and three separate states. I spent extended portions of time at multiple gates, and extended amounts of money on unnecessary things. I waited on a runway for Delta to unload something they loaded, so that they could unload what was behind it, only to reload it all over again. I didn't wait for Seattle's Best to put the espresso in my soy latte. They forgot. I drank a cup of steamed soy milk instead. 

This was my first extended stay in someone else's country. There was a moment on my last bus ride, headed down town, where I felt a profound sense of gratitude. There was no room to move on the bus, unless you were willing to elbow someone in an awkward place. It smelled of teenagers, as they were just leaving school, many on their way to another, I would presume. There were mothers trying to corral their kids, men in suits loosening their ties, and ajumas holding tightly to the bar on the seat in front of them. I was standing, hovering, and glanced over the crowd of Koreans, out the back window of the bus, at the orange sky and the glowing reflection the setting sun was leaving on everything in my view. That moment brought to surface the gratitude, and I said a silent thank you to the people around me for allowing me to come and stay with them for a while. It was gratitude coupled with a little disappointment, because of the funny nature of timing. I was just beginning to arrive at a place of comfortability with this place and it's culture. It was Tuesday, and I was going to begin my airport marathon in a mere three days. 

When I arrived in LA, after walking through a mazed line of weary travelers to get to the front, I arrived at the man in the box wearing the uniform that would give me the stamp I sought. He looked at my passport, did his inked action, handed me back my paper, and said "welcome home". "Hmmm," I thought. Home. 

It wasn't until I began to board the plane in Atlanta with the tall man in tall jeans, a starched shirt, shining belt buckle, and perfectly shaped black felt hat that I began to feel closer to my familiar version of home. After my last plane landed, I glanced out the window and noticed a patrol car that was actually a Ford pick-up truck. I wished the man in the uniform from LA had been next to me, so that I could explain to him that this, actually, was home.