LEAVING

But I’ll be back again …

It feels like I’m always leaving.

It feels like I need to stop that.

I’m getting older. Faster, or so it seems. That’s probably influencing these feelings. Saying goodbye creates a wave of emotion that feels almost like it could overwhelm my usual ain’t-we-got-fun presentation of self. Not that that presentation isn’t true. It is. I usually enjoy myself and other people whenever I am with them. Interesting people. Curious people. People who enjoy people even though it is scary. People who trust intuitively. Whoa, now I’m getting into Barbra Streisand territory. Not a bad place to be but unusual for me. I think the feeling of being overwhelmed by loss these days when I am leaving somewhere that I’ve made friends is deeply informed by the sure knowledge that I will someday actually be leaving for good. Dying that is. That is a certainty. There’s no getting around it. To paraphrase Woody Allen, “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” But I will be. There, I mean. And that’s what I really need to stop. Not leaving but avoiding the thoughts of death.

The great thing about leaving is that it implies arriving. Leaving means coming. To a new place, new people, new history, or returning home to where I know and love people and they love and care for me. Now I’m almost at a Hallmark-greeting-card-place. Let’s get back to the point ...

My son has been living in Honolulu working for the State of Hawaii as an environmental lawyer for the past year. His contract was up and there was no funding for his position anymore so he is moving on. Leaving. Not sure where he is going to go because he is not sure where there will be work for him. Government jobs are getting hard to come by for reasons that we all should know about by now. Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk say they are cutting waste from the Government but so far they are only cutting people, jobs. Undoubtably there is waste in the Government and it needs to be addressed but not so fast, buckaroo. Not so indiscriminately. Give it a little thought. Your “wood chipper” or chainsaw metaphors are a little twelve-year-old-boyish. And I don’t mean it that funny, charming, “boyish” way of a boy bringing flowers to a girl on their first ever date. It is a little more like that boy down the block when I was young who dipped a cat in kerosene and lit it on fire, swinging it around his head by the tail and laughing as the cat screamed in pain. Nobody thinks that’s charming, or funny. And if they do, they need to take a long nap and then call home.

So I have been out in the Aloha State for two weeks helping him pack up his books and accumulated stuff and shipping it back to the mainland. He took off for Japan, which may well be his next semi-permanent destination. He seems to have inherited his mother’s good looks but my tendency to roam. He made a couple of good friends in the year he was out here. They became friends of mine as I visited him three or four times during his year here. I like the people he likes because they are smart, curious, caring, good at something, and because they genuinely like and care for him. So, last night, as I left his building, having emptied out his apartment, cleaned it, and said goodbye to his walls, floor and ceiling, and the view for the last time, I sat on the wall outside and cried for a while. Not long. Just enough to know I was alive and feeling and had not gone to stone. Again this morning, riding to the airport, alone and silent, checking baggage and going through TSA, doing the routines that have become commonplace to my existence I could not stop thinking about leaving and how I have always been doing it. Working all my adult life as an itinerant actor, going from town to town, play to play, film to film, I got used to it. Either that or I was already used to it, or it was part of my DNA and I just found a job that suited that predisposition to more around a lot. Even after getting married and having a child we still moved a lot. Six homes in eight years. Then the marriage ended and that meant a big ‘leaving.’ I think my son kind of became my home after that. Wherever he needed to go to build himself a better version of himself I went. Sometimes I was grumpy about it and sometimes I was very happy. Most of the time a little of each. The tears and the sadness and the sense of loss aren’t about feeling sorry for myself, it is really about a kind of joy at how persistent life is, how it goes on, filling me up again and again with a wealth of emotion, of feelings, of thoughts, of people. How frightening that can be, how difficult and complicated but ultimately how enriching. And I know that those feelings are intensified because of the times and the world that my son is going to have to navigate and that I am going to have to live through because there are people who have a completely different plan for the earth. If they have a plan at all. It feels more like they are just flailing about wildly trying to make their adolescent dreams of power and influence and money come true. It may be awhile before they are gone, before they leave and let the people who actually enjoy life live their lives, feed their children, work in the yard, take a hike, play ball in the backyard, build something sustainable, and dance in the street with their neighbors or hold hands while the sun rises. As I find myself saying a lot lately, let’s just relax, reach out and say hello, find the good people and see if they want to dance a little bit. There are more of us than there are of them. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” So said Dr. Martin Luther King. I’m happy to ride that wave as long as I last.