My, How You've Grown

Bringing the significant changes of the past four years back to old haunts sets the challenge of reinvention. Good old T S Eliot described it in Journey Of The Magi:
"We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,"

The discomfort is in the shifted expectations I have of myself, work, other people. Before we left New Zealand I read some books about repatriation in which a common theme was one of finding a new space to occupy in an old familiar place. Don't get me wrong; it's an exciting and natural process, a confirmation of growth over stagnation, but the four-year gap has had a jarring effect on re-entry. I consciously resist the temptation to say 'my, how you've grown' to friends' children and former students who have doubled in height during our absence, though it is said to me in subtle ways.

My shifted space includes new and interesting friends, changed expectations of old friendships, more enjoyment of the countryside, daily cooking and baking, grappling with procrastination born of autonomy, a stripping back of material things. I wouldn't have predicted some of these.

Driving to Las Vegas

It's what I imagined but bigger. Driving away from Los Angeles was like one of those perspective things on the interweb where you start with a quark and pull back until you see the whole leaf, then the tree and the town and the continent and the planet and you keep going until you are Zaphod Beeblebrox or some such. Anyway, LA is vast and all-encompassing until you see the desert beyond. We drove four and a half hours through a brown rock-strewn moonscape punctuated with water towers, abandoned trailer parks, a prison and tiny settlements, broken signs on high gantries advertising long forgotten venues and events, the occasional fenced compound housing assorted trucks, sheds, shacks and old cars. It could have been another Disney creation for all that I was able to connect with the scale and reality of it.
We talked in the car about all those people who inched across this shimmering dustbowl in carts, looking for a better life; what we will endure to find what we want, to find a home worthy of us. What a privilege to sit in our (huge) refrigerated steel ship listening to the Eagles (sorry, but what else ?) and glide along our smooth desert corridor. A rich experience, I loved it; the incredible scale of the desert, the album-cover Joshua trees, the dead-straight roads, the expressions of awe from the kids as each new sight rolled past.
After 200-odd miles of this there was a road sign: Las Vegas 63 miles, Salt Lake City 560 miles. I thought about it, but only briefly.