Here, There and Back Again

I remember reading Tolkein's The Hobbit when I was younger and my imagination was not only kindled but stoked to a raging fire by the incredible land that he had created.  After reading The Hobbit half a dozen times, Middle Earth was, I suppose, the Gen X version of Millenials' Hogwarts - a place of fantasy that seemed too real to be fake.  At the end of the book, we are told that Bilbo is writing his memoirs about his adventure and his understanding that the thirst for adventure is often drowned out by the desire to return home.

Bilbo's memoirs are entitled There and Back Again and in many ways, the title resonates deeply with me.

As I write this, it is 3:30 on a Wednesday morning.  I sit in the midst of two clicking clocks, one a cuckoo, and the other a mantle clock chiming to let me know that I'm up far too early in the morning and yet entirely helpless to go back to sleep.  My companion?

Madam Jetlag.

Our plane touched down yesterday afternoon in Adelaide, it's wheels skidded somewhat ungracefully on the tarmac, a jolt and a screech and then that growling noise of the engines that slows us down and always seems to make me feel as if we're about to crash into a wall at the end of the runway.  I looked past my daughter Greta's face to see a cloudy sky, marshmallow clouds painted grey on the underside, and I welcomed the thought of being back again.

The last three weeks had taken me there, back to the U. S. where I had grown up, not to a mysterious place of enchantment, of dwarves, dragons and surprisingly nimble wizards, no, nothing like that, just the Midwest of the United States, like an American Middle earth.  There are a startling number of positive comparisons with the Midwest and Middle Earth - the people seem settled, honest and open, roots pushed far down into the middle of the earth situated somewhere between contentment and frustration.  Talk of politics seemed to be anathema, although those who wanted to question Australia's views about the current American President's policies were plentiful.  I, perhaps, was probably the wrong person to ask, and as a pseudo Australian ambassador, I sadly professed to know only what the media asked me to swallow (or force-fed me, depending on the topic), and talk quickly moved on to other things, the weather being most prominent among them.

Midwesterners seem to be content to put their feet up at night, to have an early supper, an early nightcap and an early to bed.  They gather at church on Sundays; they meet at the local restaurant for lunch; their language is not often tainted by profanity (unless they might be playing cards) and as they watch the setting sun, they, as a stereotype, are quick to thank God for the day that had been dealt for them which had been shuffled from infinite possibilities.

But I get ahead of myself.  Perhaps we start from the end - knowing already where the trip has taken us, like Bilbo's reflection to Lonely Mountain (or Erebor) where a whispered treasure was located.  Traveling with thirteen other people, Bilbo finds that on his journey, his greatest treasure is the memory of what he experienced, not the souvenirs he put in his basement.

These reflections will be mine, and maybe mine alone.  In all our reflecting for writing memoirs we most assuredly misrepresent the reality of what actually happened because the emotional attachment to the memories clouds the factuality, but whether I write down a statistical representation of the places we went to or the feelings glued to them, I think in my own mind I find Truth.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit, not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down and eat; it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort...

I don't live in a hole.  In fact, it's quite the opposite.  In the front bay window that looks out over the cul de sac and into the front yards of various neighbours who, by all accounts, are hobbit-like like myself, except for one neighbour who is particularly attached to late night activities with thumping music and the sounds of various atrocities being perpetrated by video gaming (much to the chagrin of all the other middle-aged hobbits) is a quilt rack.  It is made of a nondescript wood, not that it doesn't have a description, but I don't know enough about wood to be able to label it.  The odds are it is something like maple, but I won't guess. (Even though I just did.)  On the three arms of the quilt rack are draped small blankets that are used at night for lap blankets.  All the other amazing quilts are situated on beds during the winter so the quilt rack looks almost bare.  Many of those quilts have been made by matriarchs in my history and each one of them has a story, but we won't set off onto that journey yet.

Before we left to go back to the United States, I pondered the adventure that was about to occur, or at least my expectations of it.  I knew that I would be visiting family and friends again, a trip into the Canadian boundary waters for fishing and fun, a trip into the past to visit my grandparents, but beyond that, I had imagined, or at least mentally created what we would be going to do.  It's a fun thing to imagine the future, and as of this point in my life, I have never painted the picture correctly.  Certainly, there are brushstrokes that have come true, but for the most part my imagination of the future is quite faulty.

When we imagine the future, our inner Da Vinci's draw the BCS (Best Case Scenario).  The reality of those pictures seem to be masterpieces and we can't wait to get to them, but more often than not what we get is a Picasso, a Cubist distortion of what we expect broken up into odd juxtapositions of reality and fantasy and it is in the eye of the beholder (and also the artist) to understand the TCS (Truest Case Scenario) of what occurred.

As I sat on the sofa before we left, I channeled my inner Jules Breton (If you don't know Breton's works, find them online - incredible pastoral scenes!) and attempted to paint a realistic picture of what was about to occur.  I knew that there would be mountains, rivers, lakes, plains and even a dragon lurking somewhere, and as I drew the map of my own Middle Earth, my heart bounced with anticipation.  What would be different?  How can the Midwest possibly be exciting?  What Smaug-like dragons would be slain on our quest?  What about traveling companions?

So here we start in my comfortable hobbit hole reflecting on the there and the back again.  Join me for a journey, if you'd like.