Acceptance

 I don’t care who you are, there is always something comforting about a mother’s lovingly prepared food.  It could be Kraft mac and cheese out of the box, it can be prepared just like every other mother prepares it, and if you are eating it in your mother’s kitchen, its going to taste better than any other Kraft mac and cheese you’ve ever had in your life.  I imagine this is because the fork is your mother’s fork, the bowl is your mother’s bowl, the table is the table you sat at as a kid, the kitchen has that feel of familiness and wholeness that you try to recreate in your own home, and all of these factors, sentimental, ornamental, and the ritual of eating all combine to make mother’s cooking the cooking you eat even if you are full.  You fill up twice or three times over just because you can.

Last night it was asparagus soup, a 2006 Argentinian Luigi Bosca Melbec D.O.C., a cup of Bigelow Earl Grey, a Reese’s peanut butter Easter egg, oven heated baguette, and as a final course, tortellini in red sauce, more Melbec, and perfectly broiled garlic bread with the richness of crisped butter that I could never do on my own because the texture of butter in solid form as it is lathered fatfully across the bread freaks out my personal sense of nutritional health.  But if someone else can do it for me and it tastes good, I’m all about it.

Mother suggested that we watch an Australian produced movie entitled The Spirit of Australia.  Father had gotten a new toy this week.  He had generously given me his mammoth of a box TV over the winter with the complete surround sound home theater system that I watched Terminator 2 on so many times I could anticipate the bone crunching surprise of a terminators foot on a human skull in the opening scenes of post apocalyptic Earth during the war with the machines.  The mammoth TV was produced just before the widespread use of flat screen TVs because the technology was just becoming affordable to us average Joes.  So father was without a television and this just wasn’t going to do.

We played the movie on the 42” HD display.  The movie had 4-5 minute segments on major scenic areas of Australia and each segment was played with an Australian music track involving drums, didgeridoos, and the like.

The video started out at Uluru (native name), or Ayer’s rock (some  Australian politician), in the middle of the freaking Outback desert. Its this giant water carved over dome, its staggeringly tall, freakishly spiritual, and amazing by all standards of wonderment. I watched the footage, I listened to Mother’s stories about visiting, and I just couldn’t muster up any sort of enthusiasm.  I know that sounds like blasphemy, right?!  I’m going to fly 23 hours to the Southern Hemisphere, visit this giant nation continent, and after a great home made meal, I can’t even erect a small tower of interest in the place I’m visiting?  Maybe they’ll give me some sort of Australian pride Viagra when I touch down on the island that will get me all perked up and ready to intercourse with one of the most beautiful places on Earth.  I’ll be kept awake at night looking over tour books, pictures of the day, Internet inquiries about the places I’ve been or will go to, and will wake up the next day and do it all over again.

So, I kept watching the video and I found myself paying more attention to the music than the video footage.  The music was rich and interesting to me.  Perhaps I should remember the music of the continent as a place of future exploration. We turned it off after about 25 minutes and watched George Carlin’s last videoed comedic performance at the young age of 70. To his credit he spent the first 30 minutes of his shtick dealing with the topic of death and old age.  I don’t think he got the laughs a comedian desires from the death shtick but I loved the bit because he is a truth teller, was dealing with his own mortality, and he was not pretending to be something that he wasn’t. If he was up there cracking jokes about the one night stands he just had as a 70 year old, I’d be a little suspicious. The rest of the show was gut wrenchingly funny and I think Mother laughed so hard she had to excuse her self to the bathroom and then to the garage for a smoke.

I used to only want to live to age 50, I was only 18 at the time.  At the age of 25, I wanted to live to 60.  At the age of 28, I would be happier with 80. Now at the age of 30, I think 120 would do me well.  It could happen.

Being 30 and traveling to a different place in the world is different than being say 23 and traveling the world.  I own a home, I’ve been married and seperated, and I’ve worked in the quote unquote “real world” as a time punching cubicle-habituating adult for eight long and glorious years.  For those of you that have more experience than me in the “real-world,” have more maturity than me, have grieved more sorrows, and experienced brighter joys, I don’t have to tell you that life takes a tremendous amount of acceptance.  You learn to accept all of those critical choices you made as a 17 year old when you had to decide about occupations and college, you learn to accept the decision to place your loved one’s education before yours-leaving you without a degree, you learn to accept the surroundings around you, the gifts you’ve been given, the gifts you haven’t been given, the major sorrows, the minor pleasures, the war torn world, the knowledge our species is wearing the planet down into a blackened nub, and how little you can feel in the big scheme of it all.

Amidst this general life acceptance, I found an acceptance of the natural beauty around me in Central New York. The data is in people: Syracuse NY only sees 63 sunny days per year.  Yep 63 out of 365.  So if you choose to base your mood off of the weather and you live anywhere within a 3-hour radius of Syracuse, you are basically deciding to be depressed 83% of the time.  Finding the beauty in everything, other than the boldness of the weather alone, is like finding the buoy thrown to you during an icy ocean liner shipwreck

The pastures going in to work on a rainy day, the bright green of the grass as April springs into May, the ease of walking through the woods on a warm March afternoon, the slicing of waxed skis down a freshly groomed trail, the sparkling water cascade of a gorge waterfall, the tiny tributary flow just down the road, the smell of aging moss in the forest, the call of an unidentified bird at twilight, a fawn nestled at your feet trying to be little and unseen, the cloudy sunsets and sunrises, my two favorite intertwined double helix shaped trees in the morning, and the endless lakeside wineries are all accepted, good, and real.

When I saw the flattened pictures of Australia, all I could see is that their beauty was just as real, true, and beautiful as the beauty I see everyday.  I did not have a longing. I did not feel like I was missing out on something I hadn’t ever been able to have. I felt whole in the surroundings around me.  I still appreciated the images, I still looked forward to being amidst them, but I’m happy with what I have everyday.

To say all that ,is a paradox in itself because I still struggle with the routineness of my every day life versus wanting to be a world traveler of strange lands that gains impressions, interviews people, and carries on with wanderlust.  Have you ever heard the songs from Dillon or Paul Simon about being on tour?  Isn’t there a melancholy to it?  Melancholy from being a stranger in a strange land, not having your family tribe daily, not having your favorite leather chair to sit in, and not being in a normal routine.  Then what do these artists do?  They settle down in a place, they have a family, they take time to be and to accept that which is around them.  The one hit wonders are my favorite. They make money and then they are gone never to be heard from again after their little nest egg is birthed and stashed away.

Of course, pictures never do a scenery justice.  I have pictures from a trip I made to the rainforests of Puerto Rico.  It was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been and the pictures just don’t bring back that feeling of wonderment. So, I suspect Australia is similar.  I’ll love it there. I’ll fall in love with the landscape and the spirit of the land. I’ll snap away hundreds of times with my camera, I’ll try to capture that which cannot be captured, and I’ll reminisce on these words with these pages through these fingertips knowing that when all is seen and experienced, I’ll go home and I’ll be happy that I traveled, and happier that I’m done traveling, and back to the beauty of a routine, a home, a people, a tribe, a place that is 17% of the year sunny, and 100% of the year my favorite place to be.