I turn thirty in less than three months, and it almost seems arbitrary. The only credence is given by others, the way Christians give the word or Christmas (or lack thereof, as in Xmas) power. Whether a product of a Hallmark-imposed milestone or legitimately nearing a scenic outlook on a life lived, there’s one thing I’m sure of:
I am but a glutton for life.
Everything there is to experience, I take seconds. Is this bad? Is this good? Can I wear my experiences on my merit badge sleeve in the way that others wear their credit score, cars, and golf clubs? I love eating, drinking, sexing; basically any “-ing” they say is potentially bad for you or potentially addictive…except heroining and mething. I just don’t get those two, I guess.
An only child for all intents and purposes, my life’s experiences have been collected by only me. Some friends have been mile markers and some have been road trip compatriots, but there’s been no single copilot for these thirty years.
“The list of things I used to be is longer than the list of things I am.”
How gorgeous is that line?
The author of the line above, Ms. Dessa Darling, wrote a story in her first book (because I know there will be more!) about traveling abroad. I do not know her, and only if the luckiest of circumstances occur will I ever meet her; and yet she, like many others I’ve loved through page and track pushes me to try and articulate these merit badges and battle medals and heart scars and bones gathering dust in my closet. Without the expression of said moments and feelings they sit as falling trees in a forest without a witness. Does it make a sound? Did I hear it or think it? Our brains use the EXACT same functions to listen to a sound and hear a sound in our head, so what if we never actually heard it? What if, in retrospect, we just add a sound (or a meaning) to experiences to make the memory more pleasing to recall? Our brains just faking our ears, souls, and even themselves to manufacture a feeling of meaning to ease the cruelness of the world
In her first book, Dessa wrote a beautiful piece about traveling through South America. The end of the story struck me like a sudden gust of wind; the way it steals your breath for just a second, and your subconscious gives you that ever-so-slight jolt of adrenaline you can smell in the tip of your nose warning your conscious that danger is but a breath (or lack thereof) away. Near the end, she says, “But if there is a larger picture, it is lost on me…this story has no moral.”
In the interest of sharing this one before it’s lost to the ages, I have a story whose song still plays in my head.
When I was 20, I decided to shun all the study abroad programs my school offered, and enroll in a national program to see if I could be a “new” me to a group of people I’d never met. Not that I was unhappy with myself, but I needed to see if I could do it solely on my own. No connections, no history. I enrolled in the University of Oslo through the SUST program, and moved to Oslo. I lived in a 6 bedroom flat with 3 Norwegians, 2 Slavic women, and an American woman. Life was scary, exciting, and financially destitute…but wonderful. Talk amongst exchange students flows like summer camp concentrate.; passionate, forced, idealistic, and a few shades of misguided. Time always feels fleeting, and relationships have an air of desperation due to the ever-looming end of the semester.
I took a week to visit central Norway to see life closer to the village my family came from, and experience life away from the city. I ended up in the town of Levanger. During WWII, there was a concentration camp nearby in a town called Falstad. The government, as a defiant protest to Norway’s occupation by the Nazis, has preserved everything from said camp. The drawings on the walls from “defiant and misguided children,” the work fields, and the prisoners’ barracks…all sit silent as a hushed reminder of what we as humans are capable of.
The gentleman guiding the tour was the only employee in sight. He was a tall, stoic Norwegian who measured each sentence before he spoke, betraying either a lack of confident handle on the English language or a reluctance to open up about what in fact occurred here. He took us through the barracks and an eerie silence overtook him. He pointed at the crude lines in the walls, and the letters scrawled beneath them. Those letters were the names of those who were executed one by one, and the lines were the counts, in paces, to the unmarked graves. Each line, each letter was scratched out with fingernail on plaster, with the stains of blood 50+ years old still telling their pain. There were even hidden arrows pointing which direction to walk. The Nazis took three each time, had them dig two holes, shot two, and had the third carry the shovels back.
He then took us through the paces and paths they’ve now identified to the graves, marked in quiet fashion as a tip of the hat to those who died for such a misguided ideal. We quietly looked on at the crosses and listened to his story about the hundreds not accounted for yet. I found my hand interlocked with the woman standing next to me, each finger a security blanket to the opposite hand’s shocked child. No one knew what to say.
We walked back in silence. The crunch of each step couldn’t help but be counted, whether as a marker of our quiet respect to those who died, or a soul’s EKG beeping as one, hoping and praying for normalcy but being left with the arrhythmia of a small group too affected to notice.
When we returned to the main building, the man asked gently if anyone had any questions. I have no idea to this day what possessed me to speak up at that moment, but I asked him why he chose to work there. This is what he said, to the best of my memory, without exaggeration or hyperbole:
“If you look to the east, there is a farm now, as there was then. I was 5 years old when the Nazis turned Falstad into a death camp. My mother and father were so scared something bad would happen to us that they just continued on farming, and literally ignored what was going on behind our fence. After a year had gone by, my curiosity got the best of me, and I began sneaking off to the back fence to look at all the people in the camp. After a week or so, one man started smiling when he saw me. I smiled back, and wondered what somebody that nice was doing in prison. I went there every day after my chores, just before dinner, so watch the people and look for the smiling man.
“Finally one day, after looking in all directions for a minute, he walked over to me. I backed away from the fence, scared to talk to a real live prisoner, and in very rough Norwegian, he said ‘Come here.’
“I walked ever-so gingerly to the fence, and asked the only thing I could think of, ‘What do you want?’ And his response still sits with me to this day. All he said was ‘Pray for me.’ And so I did. Every day, just before dinner, I’d run to the fence and pray like the small dolls whose hands we put candles in at Christmas. Every day. No matter snow, rain, cold, or sun, there I was, praying for this man I didn’t even know.
“Almost three years later, the Allies liberated our town. We lined up to throw garbage and rotted food at the Nazi prisoners, and I looked with all my being for the man I was praying for all this time. Finally there he was, walking and smiling like the first day he saw me. He stopped, and walked over to me. My heart leapt into my throat, because I didn’t know if I didn’t pray hard enough to get them out earlier or said the wrong thing, and then he knealt down and said, ‘Thank you for praying for us. Thank you for praying for me. They killed my wife, they killed my family. I don’t know where I’m going right now, but I at least owe you this.’ And he pulled out a gold ring; his wedding ring. I guess he didn’t need it anymore.”
I looked at him, and tears filled my eyes. He was holding up his right hand, with a gold band on his ring finger, and was staring at me.
“You ask why I work here. My friend, I have not taken this ring off since that day, even though it took 14 years until it fit. I’m here to ask you what is your ring? When you are moving slower and feeling older like me, what can you look back on and say you did? Find your ring. Please.”
It seems simple at first, but where is the true moral to that story?
As I look back on my life, I search for my own truths and morals. The harder I look, the more I realized how many of my stories I’ve attached a moral to in order to feel like there was a plotline to my story. As a nonbeliever, an atheist, a heathen, or whatever the media decides scares people the most, it’s hard to say at thirty that I’m still not sure what to hang my hat on. That said, I think my road trip compatriots are better, the vehicle of my life is handling better, and I may have just been lucky enough to find a copilot for the next thirty years.
So, um, where are we going next? Any ideas?
Posts
1 comment:
Nicely done.
Post a Comment