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On Longing for Belonging
Where do we go when it’s not safe to go anywhere?
I had the urge to write today, but I didn’t know what was going to come out. That’s a confusing and oddly exciting feeling. It’s rather like a rainy windstorm, rather like the rainy windstorm that’s careening around my porch furniture at this very moment — you’re sitting there in front of this thing not knowing how it’s all going to end. We don’t know how it’s all going to end. Do we?
Except, one would argue, the writers. They always know how it’s going to end, especially the writers who start at the end and then work backwards until they get to the beginning. I know some writers work that way, but I’m not smart enough to do it like that. Ah; a self-deprecating comment — at least I made it to the second paragraph before one slipped out. God, I love a good storm, don’t you?
When I was a boy, my mother and I would turn two of the dining room chairs around to face the bay windows in the dining room during a really good storm. Sometimes, she would make popcorn, and we would sit together and watch The Movie. It was exhilarating and close and warm. Whatever was happening outside couldn’t touch us, and that was very reassuring for a very scared little bowlcut boy who had purple bags under his eyes by age 7 from a chronic dearth of sleep, a child who believed that everything “out there” could, and would…