The night before leaving Staunton, I made sure it was charged and ready for what I presumed would be a nine and a half or ten hour drive back to Indiana. It was one of the only things that had managed to keep me occupied on the drive to Staunton several weeks earlier, and I assumed I would be needing its services again. But the morning before I left, I ran into Garrett in the lobby of the dorm as he was about to head to warm-ups and rehearsals with the high school campers he was responsible for. Over the past couple of weeks, I'd gotten the privilege of spending a little more time with Garrett--just before I drifted off to sleep my phone would go off and it would be Garrett asking if I wanted to join him and a couple of the others at the YMCA gym in the morning. Or he would text me at 11:00 at night and ask if I wanted to go for a late night jog (which we did, in the drizzling rain, and afterwards sat in his car listening to light rock, talking a little, and sipping hot tea he'd so conveniently happened to bring). He asked me to a local theatre group's performance of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, and afterwards we watched Batman Begins a day or so before the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.
On several occasions, especially when it was just the two of us, we had a couple of fascinating conversations about our views of life, spirituality, even some social issues and politics. Despite my fears, I did finally manage to reveal that I came from a very conservative Christian background, and admitted that even if my personal views as an adult no longer aligned perfectly with my upbringing, they were still influenced by it sometimes. And he didn't recoil--of course not. Though he did ask curiously if I still believed in a God. I told him I did, even if I was in a rather currently disillusioned place with the church. He in turn shared with me that he grew up with his mother in a home with ideologies that were so far left there was no further to go, and that his father was Jewish (which made our next discussion about Rachel Corrie that much more poignant), and that he had believed in a God, but no longer did.
It was good to have a real conversation. To be perfectly honest about much-deeper-than-superficial things with someone else I had just met from a completely different walk of life who was also perfectly honest with me. It was good to feel that, without any intentionality from either of us, we had shared what we needed to of our stories. Because, even though some people may not think so, we met on common ground--with no fences, no invisible walls. Exactly what I needed.
On top of it all, Garrett's charm and happy-go-lucky personality are magnetic, and by the time I had to leave--regardless of whether or not he thought the same of me--I thought of him as a friend I was truly going to miss. So when I ran into him in the lobby the morning before I left, though we had talked about going for another jog before I took off, it didn't look like time was going to permit it and I was going to say goodbye to my new friend. But he asked me to meet him for coffee before I left.
I agreed, and met him at the coffee shop a little later. He bought us both iced coffee and we sat in the sunny back garden talking for about an hour. As the conversation drew to a close, he was telling me about a movie, and asked me to come with him back to the dorm so he could at least show me the first five minutes of it. But, when we arrived at his room, he realized he was missing a cable for the TV and instead simply handed me the movie with a wave of his hand and an, "I'm moving into a matchbox apartment in New York City in a couple of weeks. I need to get rid of most of my shit anyway--you're actually doing me a favor." Then, as we kept talking, he somehow decided that I also needed to listen to an audio book that he had. He described some of the opening plot, and told me that I really did have to listen to it because it was so good, so I obviously needed to take that too--some entertainment for my ridiculously long drive. Not able to think of an excuse to say no, I acquiesced and took both the audio book and the DVD.
So, as I pulled out of the dorm parking lot for the last time, with Garrett looking ridiculous just outside the dorm door waving a crinkled white paper napkin in a comic farewell as I pulled away and my iPod tucked, ever useless, into one of my backpack pockets for what ended up being a twelve hour drive, I fumbled with Disc 1 of Horns, a novel by Joe Hill--a writer who has striven to make a name for himself somewhere outside of the enormous shadow of his father, Stephen King.
There are those who have tried to tell me that God and spirituality are becoming more and more absent from the world as we move into some sort of secular age, and that as atheists take over our country--removing the ten commandments from the lawns of our courts of law and striking "In God We Trust" from our one dollar bills and "under God" from our pledge of allegiance--somehow all things spiritual are being slowly erased as we plunge toward certain doom. But let me tell you. I have been convinced over and over again by conversations I've had and things I've seen, heard, and read that God and spirituality are still very much present and part of public conversation and thought in this world, whether or not people recognize it (or like the wrapping it comes in). I was planning to dive in and dissect my thoughts on the book Horns for you today, but I only just finished it and thought it might be good to let my thoughts incubate a while. So consider this the preface.
No comments:
Post a Comment