Splashy

I woke up to rain this morning, and it’s continued being a wet day.  Jerry stuck his nose outside and came back in to complain that his fur was damp, he’s been nudging me to stop the wet, please, all afternoon.  So when I saw this photo of Guyaguyare in south-eat Trinidad, I decided to share it.  Don was quite happy last night as his team won, so he and his son were chatting until fairly late; I admit to some relief as it gives me a (short) break until they start playing again.  He was glued to baseball today, and that’s just one of those things.  I spent a large part of the day working on a crochet project, and I worry that I don’t have enough yarn to complete it.  I tried finding more online, but the colour I have seems to be discontinued.  Worry not, I will find a solution that doesn’t involve me starting over!

I have been privileged through my life; I’m realizing that more and more.  I am not wealthy, nor did I attend an exclusive school, but I’m a child of parents who were married from before my conception until my mother’s death after being together for 45 years.  I speak the majority language of the country where I live and at least one other fluently, I have a university education, my family took vacations together for most of my childhood and youth, and my parents held jobs in respected fields, never working shifts.  All of those, and several other factors have shaped my outlook on life.  One of those factors is that I have never lived in a country where there was a war, nor have I had to cope with the aftermath of one.  This makes a difference in how I react to stories of refugees and their movements.  Like a lot of other people, I’m sympathetic to them, but I do not (thankfully) share their experiences.  The sheer volume of displaced persons is unimaginable, and my mind and heart can’t process that.  I mention this because I was having a conversation with a friend who has escaped a war-torn country, and one who’s lived through communism, and another who arrived as a refugee, and I understood that their experiences were worlds away from my own comfortable life.  One said that she’d got so used to the sounds of bombs falling that she could sleep through the sirens (in a shelter); another still has nightmares of neighbours fleeing; a third talks rarely about hiding to avoid persecution.  They’ve shared about long lines for food, of having to hide religious celebrations, of wondering if they’d be safe.  I will say that none of them go into fine details of any of their experiences but just skim over the surface.  I can appreciate that — talking with my late great-uncle who’d served in WWII, he never spoke openly about combat, but about his cohort, or meeting women, that sort of thing.  The only thing I share with these people is a sense of post-traumatic stress, and I’ve learnt from them methods of coping.  At first, when I heard about their adventures and saw their reactions, I had a twinge of “well, that’s in the past, so don’t dwell on it,”  (I never said it out loud, but it hovered just under the surface)  Then it dawned on me that they don’t raise the topic freely or easily, and I was humbled to find that they trusted me enough to share some really scary stuff.  It’s also helped me appreciate both my privilege and how brave my friends are.  

Part of me wishes that I had the power to eliminate sadness and evil… I have an occasional daydream where I have the power to eliminate any form of crime.  In my dream, I have the power to have the perpetrators identify themselves, apologize to their families for what they’ll be facing, and have them compensate their victims before they vanish completely.  I start off with those who have done violence and progress through those who have encouraged youths to become gang members or to become addicts to thieves.  Then somewhere around that point I realize that I’ve probably cut the population down to less than half of what it is, so I start over by consigning the criminals to hard, physical labour.  Which has me pause to consider whether that’s re-institutionalizing slavery, and then, well, I usually fall asleep.  But in the process, I realize that if I’d had that kind of power, I probably would never have met my friends because they’d never have left their home countries; or if we had met, it would have been a casual encounter and we’d probably never become close.  So while I don’t like that they’ve suffered, I am thankful to have met them, and I rather hope that they think that their present life is worth what they went through (including the friends they now have.)  

Yes, even my daydreams can be nerdy.  Or signs of incipient megalomania, or something.  I don’t have the power to make criminals disappear, nor to redistribute wealth to eliminate poverty, nor to protect endangered species nor save the environment nor solve any of the many, many serious problems in the world today.  My superpower is reading, making some oddball observations and trying to be a good friend.  It helps, I think, to know my limitations even as I dream of a different world.  One in which war is completely unknown and the biggest problem people face is “should I have a nap before or after lunch?”  Should I just retreat to my room and crochet at this point, now that you know how delusional I can be?  As a well-trained puppy tummy-rubber, I’m off to do my duties.  Good night!