The Street is My Museum
Lost
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On the first warm day this semester, my friends and I decided to get lost. After a cold winter, spring called us to adventure. So we drove down some backroads and parked my jeep on the side of a field. With no idea where we were or where we were going, we headed out. We trekked over fields, through mountains and jumped numerous fences. The wilderness was beautiful and all was grand until we realized we were seriously lost. Dark was quickly approaching. We were trespassing in someone’s yard when the owners came outside. At this point we looked like vegabonds, but they were extremely nice at offered to help us find my jeep. So we all loaded up into this man’s pick-up truck and we backtracked. Turns out we were miles away from where we parked and would have been wandering around in the dark had they not helped us. Below are some pictures from our lost adventure.
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Surprise
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People always surprise me. Just when you believe that this redneck person with their thick country accent will have nothing to say, they speak profound words of wisdom.
Sometimes I’m amazed about how narrow-visioned I really am. I consider myself pretty open, but in reality I have my assumptions about people formed before I even know them. I remember the day I met my now close friend Leah. We were driving to Taco-Bell with our mutual friend and we had a differing opinion about clothes. It was so petty, but I was postive that we wouldn’t be friends. She was a Biology major; I was Communications. She was loud and abrasive. I was shy and reserved. Then one day she was in the room waiting for my roommate and we ended up having a conversation about poetry. We talked about Eliot and Donne and then together we started quoting Shakespeare’s sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alterations finds.
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters no with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
Even when we were together last, we quoted this poem. Now there is so much more that connects us, faith, fears, ambitions, but this poem is the stepping stone.
This weekend we had a mini Italy reunion. One of our friends, Stephanie, was in town so on Sunday all the Bryan Italy folks and Steph got together. We ate Nutella and bread with olive oil. It took about three minutes for us all to start reminicing and laughing. As I was looking around this same thought hit me: I would never had befriended these
people had it not been for Italy. It’s been almost exactly one year since we crossed the sea and came back to America. This was our first reunion, but we were still connected. We had a lived a year apart, but we had a semester in a foreign country together. We had memories of stumbling in Italian and accidently ordering a meter pizza, and taking the wrong trains, and walking the two miles back to school with the vineyards and Alps as our landscape. It wasn’t just the expereinces that connected us. Intially yes, but then we learned about each other and we prayed for each other. And just when I believed that I would never be friends with this one person, they surprised me.
Home
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The concept of home eludes me. Especially over the last couple years I’ve spent a considerable amount of time wondering about home. I’ve lived in Tennessee most of my life but I don’t feel a strong connection to this place, or any other place. I like it here, but I can’t call it home. Part of this wondering is natural, due simply to growing older. Probably most college students like me can relate to Conor Oberst’s words, ” I feel more like a stranger each time I come home.” Over Spring Break, away from Dayton and family, I thought about home. What makes someplace home? I think more than a physical place, home is people. There are those few certain people who always make me feel at home. My friend Leah is one of them. No matter where we are, I am me around Leah. I take off all defensives. It is the most refreshing feeling to be at home with someone. Over break I listened to this song by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros countless times. “Home is wherever I’m with you,” goes the chorus. The girl and guy that are singing wrote this song together and obviously adore each other. I love it. You have to watch it; it’s endearing. This song captures my thoughts about home.
