dannydmc

I've been thinking about home a lot more lately. I'll be heading back in just 5 and a half short weaks and, as anyone who's been reading my journal over the past few months can guess, I'm tearing at the bitt to get there. I gave my Dad a call a bit earlier to keep him updated on how my paper work for Grad School is going and had a nice conversation with him for exactly 25 minutes; I know this because its been a running gag that he hates talking on the phone and that 20 minutes is all I can ask from him. Have I mentioned that my Dad is a complete jack ass Naw, I jokes (as my students would say); he's a great man and still one of my heroes, even though I've gotten to that point in my life now where I'm supposed to be blaming for folks for every bad thing they ever did to me.
I had an interesting experience yesterday and struck me as both humorous and rather scary as well. I got a frantic instant messange from my cousin Tom, who I've mentioned on here more times than I can count (I've offered to buy from an SG subscription before; but he seems to be going for 'nice girls' these days and wasn't too interested. *sighs* Poor kid doesn't know a good thing when he sees it). Anyway, he was messaging to let me know that a girl he had known in school had apparently come out of the closet.
The evidence for this realization was a picture on her Facebook account where she was with two other girls and had hinted that she'd had to crop the photo because of a lack of pants; one of the girls in the picture's hand was suggestively absent from the photo.
This would usually be no big deal at all except the girl in question was the daughter of a very religious woman we know in the community, and the poor thing had been driven to an obsession with perfection while still at home. Everyone knew the family, they're fairly prominent in our tiny little corner of the world.
It struck me then that the internet had made it even more difficult to escape home than it had ever been in the past. In the great world community its so easy for your former classmates, or the nosy woman who used to live next door to you, to track you down and keep up on the sorrid little details if your life.
I've had two run ins with this this year alone; the first serious, the second mildly irritating (and I think Tom was responsible for it; I'll have to remember to give him a black eye when I next see him! ) The first was when a member of the village I teach in somehow found this blod where I had said some very nasty things in response to someone trying to break into my house and trying to kill me. I ended up having an investigation opened with the state ethics board over it; although it turned into a mild slap on the wrist. I'd given up my fear of admitting when I was wrong some years ago, and so it wasn't hard to apologize in this case; I had been in the wrong and, more than that, had been an asshole to boot.
The second incident was when my Dad recieved an e-mail from a former co-worker saying that she was sorry to hear that I was having such a rough time of it in Alaska! I think that some of the things I mentioned to Tom got into the ear of his Mother who then spread them willy-nilly because, lets face it, this was good gossip!
One other thing struck me pretty hard, though; I'm a complete small-town, country-kid and just as bad as the others. My first reaction to hearing the news about this girl I knew was wish my sister was on-line; because she'd find this HILARIOUS. My second thought was to feel some real pity and sympathy for the poor girl in question who is just trying to live her life and doesn't need all of North Central Wisconsin (or, at the very least, the entire WIttenberg-Birnamwood School District) sticking their nose in her business. She's an adult after all and utterly deserves the right to go a little wild in college; as my Mother is fond of saying "anyone who tries to be perfect for to long is going to fall apart; you can't be in controll ALL the time". Have I metntioned before that my Mother is a very wise woman? In one saying she just summed up the Jungian theory of the Shadow perfectly.
Anyway, I really am looking forward to getting back home for a few months this summer. I miss my family, I miss those of my friends who are still in the area (not many, admittingly), and I miss being able to drive down to one of the local taverns and having a beer when it suits me. I even miss smoking a cigar on my front porch at night! Most of all, though, I miss God.
Now, before you laugh or roll your eyes, let me explain; the land I grew up on was sacred. This was never something said out-loud by anyone; but it was so blatantly obvious to everyone there that it never had to be said. Why else would my Mother walk around in such total reverence to that land, the same she grew up on; why else would she be moved to fits of apopaleptic rage when thinking about her Brother driving that land into the dust and selling it off to some bigwig from Nevada when the farm went belly up? I know that land better than I know myself; I know the smells of the seasons, the sounds of the trees, the trails I'ved walked and spilt blood on, the secret names for the places that we had come up with.
I remember last summer taking a class on Native American history in Wisconsin. We took a field trip one day and the path of this trip clipped through my neck of the woods. I ended up pointing out all of the different places, reciting the history of the different towns along the way. I'm not sure if the other students were entertained or annoyed, but I recited it anyway; I knew it all my heart.
It reminds me of the time that Tom, his brother Matt and I were walking through the church graveyard after the Bevent Church Picknik one day. I pointed out the graves of our grandparents and it seemed that, after that, every time we came to a tombstone I was able to those two how they were related to us or which families they had been a part of and so on. After a while Matt looked at me, amazed, and said "How do you KNOW all of this?"
I looked at him, shocked myself, not in the fact that I knew this information but that he'd even have asked that question. I said the first thing that came to mind "I listened", I said , "when our aunts were talking, or my Mum and I asked questions. Its interesting". And then I just looked at him and asked the only question which was in my mind at that point. "Didn't you?"
It seems he didn't. I wonder how many other people don't listen to the history that is all around us, to the STORIES that are always around us?