Return to Normalcy

We’re back.

We arrived Friday night, literally one minute before the sabbath deadline. Ann was there with open arms as well as hot soup and a loaf of Cheryl-Ann’s best-in-the-world challah.

It’s Monday and in some ways the jetlag has gotten worse. Last night, Nathan woke up at 2AM and read in bed until 3:30 when I woke up. We came downstairs, read some Hornblower, watched a little TV, and at 5:20 went to the Pig and Whistle diner in Brighton, a tradition from other jetlagged mornings. He went off to school and I went back to sleep until a 9:30 appointment.

How odd time is, transforming presence into memory and experience into stories. We will remember this trip very fondly, I’m sure. Forgetting for the moment the Lessons We Learned, it was just plain fun. For all of the sleep-deprived difficulties, it was a series of good days. And, frankly, much of the joy of the trip for me came simply from getting to be with Nathan non-stop for 12 days. I’ve worked at home for almost all of Nathan’s life, so it’s not like I never get to see him and need to get “reacquainted.” He’s just fun to be with: sunny, funny, deeply sympathetic, and wicked smart. Good combo. We’re lucky parents.

As far as getting to see China (well, the bits we saw) through the eyes of an 11-year-old, what I saw mainly was that the similarities run neck-and-neck with the differences. Granting that we were only in cities, so much of life seems the same if only because its landscape is identical: roads, cars, buildings, bridges, sidewalks. It is only within this world of similarity that the differences appear.

Not to scant the differences. But they often cannot be read from the experience itself: you might not notice that parents are rarely seen with more than one child and you would never be able to see directly that their children work harder at school than ours do. The world can seem less foreign than it is.

But that’s my job as an adult, helping Nathan to see what isn’t on the surface of experience. It’s also what makes adults so damn annoying.

We’re back amongst the familiar now. Not everything has to be interesting any more. Although, learning how to be interested in everything — how everything is interesting — is our real work, isn’t it?

Can I go to sleep now?

Categories: Uncategorized dw