Rock Star Hour

What's in a blog?

It may be too early to try to write about this stuff, but I've been saving it up. I'm probably going to break up this post into several more. Except somehow all the things I'm thinking of can't help how tied together they are. So, here goes.

The Circle Game

the circle goes round and round and the painted ponies go up and down. we're captive on the carousel of time.

I fucking love that Joni Mitchell song. Oddly enough, I just realized for some reason it came into my head in almost the same position two years in a row. The other time being my last week in Seattle, same time last year. I was writing in my diary about it all. Trying to untie the knots.

I untied lots of knots this summer. In shoestrings and tops. And tangled hair the campers would get from swimming. In the embroidery string we use to make friendship bracelets all summer long. The same string that is tied into new colorful knots to even make the bracelets and necklaces at all. To even braid them. I've got nearly 10 of them around my neck.

Last Sunday was a crazy day, but a beautiful one. I spent the weekend in Houston for Nikki's birthday. Did what a best friend should do I believe. Took her out, kept her in drinks and company. Maintained a good attitude on the outside though inside it was hard not to think about ... things. I nursed my beer and made sure I was in good shape to drive, and do anything else that was needed. It worked. She had an amazing time. And I got her home safely.

I arrived at camp for check-in of the very last session. Smiling to myself as I walked down the hall. OK with coming back one last time. Carrying my bags down the hall with joy. Seriously. And after less than three hours of sleep and a three hour drive, with a 10-hour work day and close to 50 children ahead.

I walked down the hall and I smiled. I read the posters all over again. The ones the counselors paint together during training week. Before the kids get there when you haven't the slightest idea who anyone really is yet, or how things are going to work.

There's a door on the left of the hall just before my room. A glass door that goes out to the pavillion where we would eat dinner with the campers that night, and every Sunday night since forever. Where we would have a water balloon war between the counselors and the campers on opposite sides of the volleyball net over the grass. Where we would eat snowcones and play games, and write things on the concrete with jumbo chalk. And a stage where I could play my guitar.

Without knowing all this it's just a door. But no door is just a door at camp. Not for me. That place just lives. And breathes. It is a completely different place on a Sunday morning like that, with this crazy electricity in the air about the beginning of another week, than there is otherwise -- say, in contrast to the way it feels when you are turning out the lights as you leave on the last day and floors are vacuumed and the walls are bare. When you can't hear the kids laughing in the kitchen anymore, or excitedly asking questions about what's next.

Instead, you're left to ask yourself your own questions.

That Sunday morning, the sunshine behind the glass door sparkled in a beam of airy light in the hallway.

For some reason, that feeling, that light, that moment, that place, that happiness, was so damn familiar. In a way that you want to hold onto it so badly but can already feel it slipping away. The only hope is that in its familiarity you can find comfort in that it will one day return.

And the thought of its return makes you think of a circle. Like the circle game in the song. And the circles of string around my neck. And the way you have to untangle the string of the bracelets and hold it straight just so you can tie it all up in knots again. Just like that.

It made me think about renewal. It made me think about how no matter how much you know at one time, everything's changing. And sometimes when you don't think they are, that's when they are the most.

Foolish me. I thought I had learned so much. I thought I had learned so much that I'd forgotten what camp taught me. What life has taught me. That all doors lead to someplace. That someplace could be home even to a stranger. That second chances are allowed, and thirds, and fourths and on. Because you are never the same.

I guess the Earth moves whether we notice it or not. The sun rises even if we're still sleeping. And even if we're sleeping, we're awake in our dreams. And fallen dreams may not be failures at all. They might just. Be. Like scattered clouds across the sky. Like all these tangents that somehow connect. They just do. Because they all live together in that someplace behind the familiar glass doors. And just as the weather changes, so do you.

I've been trying to finish this post forever. The editor in me says it's way too long. I apologize for that. Maybe I'm trying too hard. I'm sick right now. I've had a pretty bad sinus infection. My second one this summer. I've got to get an allergy test. And then I don't know what's next. Other than that right now I'm going to take a bubble bath and then a nap.

But I am happy again. I will say that. I really am. I'm home.