This morning I talked to a friend who just landed a job in Washington DC. And sitting on the countertop of my little 1950s-style apartment kitchen, staring out into the hot street, listening to her talk about Dupont Circle, I felt a definite pang of something that felt like regret. I pictured the stone rowhouses and shaded sidewalks and subways full of people in suits and tennis shoes speaking a million foreign languages and people playing frisbee in parks surrounded by little delis and corner grocery stores and and the feel of success and ambition and promise in the eyes of would-be movers and shakers. And I was jealous. "I'm so happy for you! Sure, I could move there in a year or so!" But then I thought about Arizona's wide-open skies, lavender and gold and white in the morning, clear and starry at night; about the Catalina mountains green from rain, of sun so bright (every day!) that you can't possibly stay in bed past 8 and instantaneous rainstorms carrying the smell of mesquite in windtorn blasts, of California's glorious and not-so-far away beaches. I remember the unmistakably Mexican sound of banda music and the casual bi-lingualism ("Y tambien, he said..."), the suprising and unpretentious open friendliness of the people here, the excitement of a simmering future of a country playing right out loud in front of me at its borders. And I am reminded again: I love this country! I DO! Aside from all the wonderful bizarre things about being American like the fact that a poor immigrant's son can grow up to be Attorney General (even if he is a slimy one) and any presidential candidate has to at least pretend to be at home in small-town Iowa and we are all so different that any comprehensive definition of "American" is impossible: I love the huge towering Northern cities and their gorgeously restored historic houses and gritty inner parts and comprehensive subway systems filled with the languages of the world and unabashed ambition. I love the West's wide open spaces and jagged mountains and and laid-back attitude about life and crazy mix of hippies and Mexicans and military families. And I love the South's glorious pink and white blossomed springs and reviving old urban neighborhoods and muddy rivers.
So wherever I end up, there is going to be regret. Regret that I cannot live in every part of this beautiful, huge, fatally flawed and yet yes, greatest country in the world. So many possible lives out there. My goal should be to enjoy the one, out of all possible variations, that I am living right now, instead of agonizing about the ones that I have not and may never live.
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I totally agree, Laura, and the funny thing is the more you move and live in different places and make friends and then leave and go faraway or have them leave and go faraway - well, the more that sense of sadness exists, but it's a sweet sadness. A bittersweet that is good. It's good, I think, to live with this tension - serves as a reminder that this isn't really our home anyway, so no place we're in ever really fully will be, either.
And I love your comments on "Lanyard" as well.
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