Over Continental Breakfasts

The terminals and the baggage claims have vanished, but the traveling has yet to cease. A few days more and I’ll actually have settled into home. For the past week, while in some respects I’ve had the easy luxury of returning to the leisure of the unemployed and spending the whole day playing with my nephew, I’ve been missing some of that real ease that begins with quiet. Even now as I push a few moments into my schedule, I’m a little lost at how to sort through the memories that sometimes run at me blindly while staring out the windows of moving cars.

The changes and revelations that I’ve seen over the past week have come in fits and flashes. While eating, pushing in the same favorite foods, the ones automatically ordered without even barely consulting the menu, I catch—usually somewhere in the middle of the meal—the idea that I really haven’t had this taste in quite some time. I try to recall all the sitting and wishing for that taste that have flooded me over the year.

It is mostly at these moments that I notice how the past year somehow seems like a bump of a skipped record. Life has continued so steadily, as it should, as it couldn’t have been expected to otherwise do. And not in the great leaps and bounds of the imagination. It is not the great advances that I oddly find myself looking for every time I return to my former homes. Old buildings should be ravaged or removed, new efforts stretching up skyward. Mostly, life plods on. Even advancement takes the same pace it always has—eating up the occasional empty field and replacing it with the pre-formed boxes and signs of an America ready for consumption. And its easy to find myself slipping into the groove I left a year ago, filling the time and space with movies and fast food, coffee and cold beer.

I’m still waiting for the chances to feel the differences more than I do now. They are there, impossible to confuse. When I look into a sky that I once might have thought was glorious and now I find the texture flat, when on the long car rides I fail to see huts disappearing beneath the green growth on the side of the road, when I’m going to bed and my friends are waking up facing a day I can’t help them with and experiencing things I’ll only know about if somehow we can both struggle against the tide of life and find the time to write each other.

Nothing seems as shocking, and also ghastly familiar, as the excesses. Walking through the nicer outdoor malls of San Diego, where people are quite as plentiful as in the camps back there, except that here their lack of covered skin is carefully placed and far from accidental or the result of natural feeding or tattered clothing. Something about the gatherings, especially in food courts and clothing stores unsettles. There was one mall, this one in Phoenix, with a constant vigil of three flame-topped pillars, each tall and blasting enough fire to cook decent meals. The worst, to me, wasn’t the waste or the fuel that spilled out burnt into the air as heat and pollution. The unease, I think, in retrospect, comes from the knowledge that in this world somebody always pays for the excess, that is isn’t just bits and pieces of flashery to amuse the citizens, but it always gets divided and placed on the bill and we pay it unheeding.

The comfort can set it off as well. After switching around with nights on couches and floors and sleeping in cars, I was lying in bed last night, a non-descript hotel room with their standard huge beds and slightly heavy blankets, including the one everyone knows they never clean. I kept thinking about how huge the bed seemed, especially when compared to my rocking bunk bed that swayed whenever Adam or I dared to roll over in our sleep. The luxury seemed fitting and not too indulgent: to spread out and feel the mattress underneath every inch of any direction I might sprawl out to. And I thought how odd it was to have this now, until I remembered that I actually had much more comfortable beds, like the soft mattress and blankets in Masindi when we went to visit Peter’s family, or in Zanzibar, or wherever, and Masindi’s night cost five dollars.

The whole experience amazes me in other ways as well. One night, I was invited to a gathering of friends at my grandmother’s house. A few of her acquaintances from church had their weekly meeting and they wanted me to come and share. Here was the entire thing that I was wrestling with condensed. How do you turn the experience into a speech or some slideshow presentation. It was easy when I set my laptop to display the many-foldered photos at the pizza shop and I sat around enjoying dinner with my friends and family, randomly telling stories whenever they surfaced in my head and the monitor at the same time. This was more like the days I stood in front of audiences, theaters and classrooms and tried to leave them with something about Uganda to dwell on that would hopefully grow someday into action. I was surprised when it felt warm and comforting to talk about everything again in this way. Even with people who didn’t know the exact circumstances, these men and women had lived through quite a bit themselves and drew from childhoods on farms and lives in wars and other struggles. They saw the folly of the world for what it was.

The perspectives of my grandmother and her friends grounded me for a while. They saw fear in the world, and hope in the youth and all of these things that I tried to bring out in them and myself. They enjoyed the pictures and the media and opening their eyes and telling stories that placed the events in their own considerable perspectives. I tried to see through their conversations and my still unformed thoughts to an idea of the world. It must be something more than people and places, but it is hard to see from hotel lobbies.