Time and Time Again

In the past month, I've eaten in a thousand-year-old restaurant, skittered up a winding path to a 900-year-old castle, and finished a book that featured 500-year-old third-generation trees growing from 2,000-year-old roots.

It would be fair to say I've had time on my mind.

. . . and what I keep coming back to is this realization that the United States is a young pup, a petulant teen, often impatient beyond impatience.

I think back to my afternoon in Bratislava, Europe's newest capital, where Mark and I attended a walking-tour 400-level college course in Slovakia's complicated history, as told by our brilliant local guide, Nora.  Wandering the city's 18th-century Old Town, Nora told about her grandfather who, in the '60s, made a crack about the communists, only to have a neighbor turn him in for such dangerous fodder.  The sins of her grandfather fell upon Nora's dad, who was then denied the chance to attend school and sent to the uranium mines instead.

Nora also talked us through closed borders, Nazi incursions, citizen revolts, peaceful breakups, a new female president and free college and health care for all.  An hour later, over beers at an outdoor cafe, Mark and I sat in wonder, reviewing the long, complicated arc of Nora's storyline, a storyline that ended with hope and possibility for the people of Slovakia.

Slovakia's stories--compelling and memorable--were hardly unique, though.  Each place we visited and each tour guide we walked with carried stories of war and loss, hope and reinvention.

Aside from an H bomb our own military accidentally dropped near Albuquerque in the mid 50s, the United States has nary a pockmark of war upon its soil.  And yet, like a swaggering male teen, our country struts and huffs and throws out its defiant arms at the merest provocation.  Ironically, these days, most of those provocations are self-inflicted.

But back to the old restaurant and the "young" trees . . .

My experiences with both travel and books this past month have helped me frame this hard-to-endure chapter the United States finds itself in.  I'm reminded to be patient.  To put down deep roots in good soil.  To share food and laughter with others.  And to crossed the padlock-riddled bridge to see what's on the other side.  Ultimately, I'm heartened by all of these old places I visited and the very new people now walking along their streets, just as I am comforted by the shade of a tree that holds generations'-old secrets in its roots.

This world is both hamster wheel and kaleidoscope--the same old same old and a thousand unimaginable iterations of fractured light, both heartbreaking and beautiful all at once.   Hungry for a way forward, I plan on seeking the bridges and crossing them, hands and heart opened to whatever and whomever I may find on the other side.