Friday, August 21, 2015

Blowing Bubbles

She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.'

'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far to relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

A friend read that quote to me over the phone. Within a few days I had found a copy of the book. It had fit into our conversation somehow, the idea of hard to describe feelings. After all, over the past year we had had a lot of discussions about these fuzzy, vague, big words: happiness, love, belief, trust.


And while it was a little odd to read about sunny Puerto Rico while I was shivering in the rain in Scotland, I quite enjoyed the story. It turns out that the girl is right, her moment doesn't last forever. But she enjoys it while it lasts.

When I was in high school I spent a summer in Peru. While I was there I remember an afternoon when I was staying with a family in the mountains near Pisac. It was absolutely stunning scenery, the village was perched up on the hillside looking across the valley towards some higher mountains. And that day my host mother was teaching me to weave. She wove the warp around two stakes in the ground, then added the patterns in yarn heddles -- bunches of yarn to yank in order that resulted in diamonds marching down the band. It was black and white and purple and blue. And mine for weaving. You sat down and tied one end to yourself and worked towards the second stake. Sometime that afternoon she sent me to the house for something, and I remember running back down the path, mind already tied back into my project. There was this instant while I was running when I realized: I'm happy. Totally happy.


Maybe that instant is when my Watson project was born.

There was a series of conversations I had in college with a friend. They were sporadic and surrounded by chaos but they felt as though we were on a separate plane of life while they occurred. We talked about that once - how we had these bubbles of time when we chatted and laughed and
could exchange ideas almost faster than words. He understood the jumps my mind made, and I followed his own, and our conversations twisted and turned and we'd pause and wonder how we got so far from the original topic. But we never knew when the next moment would happen, or even if our schedules would align again before summer. Maybe it was because I treasured these bubbles that I was so upset when he painted a picture for a mutual friend based on one of these conversations. It was a lovely painting, but I felt like he was popping my bubble and pinning it to reality.

There have been times lately when I stopped and laughed at myself. When my reality seemed absurd. Maybe these are the new bubbles, blown by a stranger who crossed my path. Like the surfer who offered me a ride, dropped me at the beach, handed me his keys, and hit the waves.  After he left, I had a white sand beach to myself for the evening. But I didn't know where I was to be able to find the bus onwards the next morning. So I laughed, left that problem until morning, and watched the waves.


Or when I ran to the middle of the causeway between two islands at sunset and watched an otter swim beneath me. Or when I played scrabble in a hostel with a man from Germany and we tried to remember how to spell in Gaelic. Or when I walked into a craft store, and amidst the owner's explanations of choosing colors for tweed designs we realized that his son had picked me up hitch hiking the previous afternoon. Or when I arrived in Stornoway and realized that it was a "big city" because it had more than one bus stop and I was lost. It's actually about the size of Middlebury. Or when I wound up at the Ceilidh on Barra, and between electric bagpipes and Gaelic songs a Canadian got up and belted out Barrett's Privateers to a startled audience.


Honestly, in another week I'm sure my entire time in the islands will feel like a bubble. Those rainy nights in my tent, and the clack of the looms, and the endless shades of blue and grey.

These moments brought me back to those big words. Trust. Belief. Happiness. I learned a lesson here about those big words. Whether or not you understand them, they exist. Because kindhearted people gave me rides and told me stories all over these islands. The surfers, the weavers, the summer people, the old families. If I trusted the generosity I experienced here, I was guaranteed a beautiful moment. Maybe just a sparkle of sun between thunderstorms. A short chat as I waited for a bus or asked directions. Or an unexpected piece of chocolate on a ferry ride. Enough to make me smile.

And maybe it's a bubble. But maybe moments always are. And giving a salute to those fuzzy words, maybe happiness is floating towards the sky and trust is believing that someone will blow the next bubble.


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