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Shiny
Happy Pirate PAGE
TWO: "That is so amazing," guests would say, under a mound of photographs from our adventures. "I can't believe it." And I think, because I told that story, having the words come from my mouth reassured all parties involved that I was happy to be along for the ride. I wasn't a child. I was the third adult and I added the necessary sarcastic bits here and there and overacted the "You poor dear!" line so that everyone got the message: This was a crazy case of mistaken identity. More importantly, no children were harmed in the filming of this production. ~~~ The success of "You poor dear!" led my family on a series of further adventures, and there are similar stories assigned to each escapade. We lived in Saudi Arabia for two years and once vacationed at a resort owned by Osama bin Laden's family. I climbed around in Egyptian tombs, traded with Masai in Kenya, graduated high school in South Korea, and spent postcard-perfect Christmases in Switzerland and Austria. Every trip away from home meant a return to the circuit. I repeated my lines and heard that I was lucky to have such adventures because imagine -- just imagine! -- what children can learn. That is entirely true. I had amazing adventures, and I wouldn't be who I am today without them. But the anecdotes, and the act of telling them, hide something. What each one means to me, more than anything, is that I was leaving. Every adventure, every uninhabited island in the Bahamas, was just that: Uninhabited. I was alone for most of them. My best friend was an imaginary cat. How would the dinner-party circuit handle that? "And what did you think of all this, Alex? "My best friend was an imaginary cat." "Oh, you poor dear!" ~~~ This is the story I tell now. This is what I say when people ask why I don't seem to have friends, or make friends easily, or trust or confide, or exist in the external world as effortlessly as I do inside my head. This is disorientation and detachment, and I may be ungrateful because God knows eight-year-olds should appreciate their adventures when they can get them, but this is how it is. When we returned from Saudi Arabia I landed in middle school. By my sophomore year in high school I had reconnected with friends. I played on the baseball team, I called a girl, I got a note from her, and when she came to one of my games and my heart was pounding, I had three hits and I don't know if we won or lost but I remember those hits and her pretending not to watch. We moved to South Korea in the middle of that year, and on my last day at school before the move a girl named Amanda saw me standing, shell-shocked, in gym class and said, "Smile! You look so sad." That was the thing that year -- Smile! -- and I blame R.E.M. and their song "Shiny Happy People," and a sort of pre-Gulf-War-1 giddiness infecting the country. I told Amanda, "That's because I am sad." But this is what I wanted to say: "Okay. Sure. You realize, though, that this is my last day of school, right? That I'm moving and not just moving-moving but moving-to-a-different-country-moving so there's a good chance I'll never see any of you again? I don't even understand why I'm out here, why I got into this stupid gym uniform one last time, and I even told Coach Boone that when he yelled my name, 'Moody! Moody get out here, you're late again,' I told him, 'Coach I'm never coming back here, I'm never going to put on this musty blue t-shirt after today so does it matter, does any of this matter? Do you think today's lesson on learning how to use the weight room equipment is going to sink in? Do you think it will be what I remember about T. C. Williams High School on a day when I'm saying goodbye again to the friends I've had since kindergarten?' And he said, 'Moody, stop yapping and get into the weight room there's a test on this next week.' So, Amanda, I think your name is Amanda, we never really hung out but I always thought you were cute in an extremely pale kind of way...Amanda, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this particular day and that may go a little ways toward explaining my sour disposition. All I see is all of your lives progressing forward along a path that I'll never catch up to again, I'll never see again, and maybe at one point those paths will cross when I'm thirty and back in my old neighborhood roaming the grocery store aisles hoping, just hoping, to run into someone I knew before I left, but maybe not. And that's why I'm sad. People like me get stuck on paths, sometimes we don't move on and create new ones, no, we remember and cherish the old ones, the paths we should have been on and I don't think smiling can change that today, Amanda, I really don't." I'll have to assume that all made it out in a split-second meaningful glance, although I don't have much confidence that it did. Amanda gave me another, "Smile, silly," and went about her gym class way, and I went about mine, and that was that. ~~~ I'm the kind of writer who works at odd hours -- inspiration always seem to arrive between 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. -- and I can't sleep if it's light out. I spend mornings puttering around my apartment, dazed. By 9:00 a.m. I'm ready to putter somewhere else. I go to Target. There are, on any given morning, seven or eight other souls strolling the aisles. Some favor clothing, clasping and re-clasping knit polos and wrinkle-resistant khakis as they graze the Men's section. "This," I imagine them saying, "this cotton shirt, it is tactile. It is real and stabilizing and when I hold it in my fist I'm connected and grounded and momentarily freed of the horribly irreversible case of suburban angst with which I've been stricken." In reality there is a better chance that, "Got that one," and, "Yep, got that one, too!" is the extent of their internal dialogue. My turf is Home and Garden. I settle into a puffy chair attached to the featured patio set. The umbrella above me is always broad and welcoming. It shields me from a constant fluorescent sun. I imagine that the other chairs are filled with guests. My guests at Target. "Try some of our doorknobs," I shout. "Thanks," the guests scream, "we love what you've done with the juxtaposition of the Kitchenware and Electronics departments!" "Did you get what I was going for by putting the microwave and crock pot displays side-by-side?" I ask. "We did," they say, "and we appreciate your commentary on society's quest to both speed up and slow down, to manipulate time and space via appliance-based science." And as I look around and smile at my friends and raise a glass to one who just got a promotion or a baby or an inheritance, I think that if I close my eyes a little and squint, this looks kind of like the Halloween party at the mayor's house. The place that lived at the end of the path along the side of the house, the patio set I see now, decorated with black and orange crepe paper and spiders. There are adults and children. I can't make out any words, but there is an excited hum. The back yard is illuminated. A woman turns and waves. There are lights strung between the garage and the porch. I see a scarecrow. That's when I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened. What if I had looked up at the mayor's wife, cocked my head to the side a bit, and stepped into her home. What if I had held her hand and looked back at the street, and waved, and shut the door?
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Once
we returned to Alexandria, that story became a fixture on the official
"That Strange Family Down the Street and Their Crazy Trip"
dinner circuit. We had rented out the condominium, so after the
tenants left we were officially inserted back into our previous
lives. For my parents, the Halloween story told people what we looked
like at the beginning of a trip that took us through storms and
sinking boats, ocean travel and exploration of deserted islands,
friendships and loss. It was funny in a, "Hey, the mayor and
his family tried to feed our homeless child!" sort of way,
and it was validation. Here is what we did, the story says, and
isn't it different and exciting and strange compared to your suburban
lives? 
