I have just one thing to say right off the bat: I am SO glad to be back now!
After having to guide my taxi over the phone for almost an hour so that it could pick me up, getting stuck in London overnight when British Airways swapped my flight around while I was flying from Manchester, and losing my toothpaste to a security woman who didn’t seem to understand the concept of manners, getting back home seemed heavenly. Now, while moving from Middle-of-Nowhere Ellesmere back to East Jesus Marion doesn’t seem like that much of an improvement, other than coming back into my own culture. However, I have one indisputable advantage here: I have a car. Using the miraculous gift of driving, which the English don’t seem to understand as they careen down dirt roads while scattering startled sheep in their wake, I started making up for lost time once I returned from my brief New Student Orientation at UMass Amherst. I have not seen a single new film while I was in England, so the first thing I did when I went to catch up with some of my best mates back here was to go to the cinema. Normally I don’t binge on cinema trips, since they’re so expensive, but I’m like an addict finding a whole bag of cocaine in the form of movies. Besides, it’s a great excuse to meet with the guys. We all work summer jobs, so getting together can be a trial. We laugh and joke like nothing other than my accent has changed. I kept telling them that I don’t sound British and that you could ask any actual Brit if they heard me. Once the jokes are over though, we have to wait until the weekend or whenever Mike’s or Hunter’s weird schedules allow us to meet and Ryan is still at his school on a work study. Hunter at least can bring people to his summer camp as visitors and I helped him there for a day. When we sat down for lunch across from one of Hunter’s coworkers, we were still chatting. I looked at the guy across from us and he was giving me a strange look. Hunter then introduced him as Hugh, an actual English person. We kept talking, but he was still scrutinizing me. What’d I do? I wondered. Did I offend him somehow?
“Where are you from?” he finally asked.
“Um, here. I live in town,” I replied.
“What?” He seemed perplexed and Hunter explained my last year attending an English boarding school. “Ah! Got it! I was just really confused because you have a British accent and some of the things you say sound upper class, but others sound lower class and you’ve got a bit of Scouse and Irish in there too.”
I was baffled. Okay, maybe I do sound a bit like a limey. Not a bad thing. I explained how I had lived near Chester (low class, almost accent) for most of the year, but at a boarding college with lots of rich kids (upper class), and one of the guys I hung out with frequently was a self-professed Irish Liverpudlian (hence the Irish and Scouse). I must say that I was pretty pleased that I’d thrown him for a loop. For one I’m glad that some of the accent stuck, but, better yet, I proved Sam, one of my roommates, wrong when he said that I was a lost cause and wouldn’t learn the accent. Ha! So there Sam!
Anyhow, my own job tends to be rather solitary and most of the time I’m left alone with my thoughts and my music as I pull weeds or excavate boulders the size of lower Manhattan. Normally I enjoy the solitude, the chance to think, or the opportunity to forget about thinking and absorb myself in landscaping. However, I’ve been sick as a dog since I got back from England and it got worse just before going back to work! I’ve been swaddled in sweatshirts, blankets, and covered in a eighty-pound lap dog on the couch ever since. That means no making money for university and occupying each day with work, no riding my bike to the beach, and, worst of all, no going to Ken-Po at night! The one thing that I need to go back to as soon as possible to relieve my stress and to prepare for the second degree black belt test in October is barred from me because of some stupid virus! It seems that Murphy’s law, that what can go wrong will go wrong, applies on a small scale too. The lack of company didn’t help either. I began to miss Ellesmere again and, like last summer, Tabor too.
The one benefit to everyone being trapped together in the same school all of the time is that friends get to see each other often and goof off together. I couldn’t care less about Ellesmere itself. As a matter of fact I’ve pretty well determined that I didn’t like the school itself or how it was run, but the community of students plus some teachers was great. It makes me wonder what I missed not boarding at Tabor. I longed to be able to just walk down the hall and have a chat in someone’s room or steal a Krispy Kreme doughnut. Living like that for a year made coming back to my house in the woods seem rather lonely. Okay, so maybe coming home wasn’t so heavenly as I had first thought. Having everything around me like the schedule, the gadgets, and the rules be intuitive to me is great, but now that I am often without companions, it’s a bit dull. Now I often find myself thinking about my new student orientation last week. Aside from getting lucky with who I was rooming with that night, there were dozens of lectures to attend, plenty of random and fun things to do or see, and, better yet, I hit it off with a couple of great girls that I spent my time with whenever we could meet. The English accent seemed to be a big hit as I turned heads when I spoke and had to explain my gap year more times than I could count. I didn’t think that getting friendly with everyone would be quite so easy, but most of these people followed the New England social standard: They will not speak to you at first, but once you put in the effort and say “Hi,” they can be as friendly as anyone you’ve ever met. Flitting from one group to another and becoming a friendly acquaintance with bunches of people is my specialty, but fortune smiled on me when I found a couple of people that I chat with even since we went home for the summer. All it took was introducing myself to one of them and mentioning my interest in musical theatre for the other to appear.
After leaving Tabor and Ellesmere, I had a gap in my life. After Tabor, I kept myself just as busy as before, I still went to Ken-Po whenever possible, and I still read too much, but I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing my mates each night or the next day. The same is happening now with my farewell to Ellesmere and I find myself again with the gap in my life. Looking at the orientation that has just passed though, I now know that I will soon have a life like that again, even more vibrant and fulfilling than before. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that the laws of nature apply to the laws of the heart. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, whenever something goes missing from your life, something else will appear to fill the void. In my case, I just needed to go out and find it. Until school and new friends fill the breach, I will settle with the usual summer occupations and count the days until I move into university and feel my heart mend anew.
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