Goodbye and welcome
The afternoon is a little too warm for comfort. When I pick him up, he is harried and joyless and pretending to be cheerful. Heat bounces off the top of the car and scurries in the windows, and he whips out a to-do list.I am only the driver; I fancy myself a chauffeur with sole rights over the radio. My friend, you may never've heard of it, but today you will listen to Hotel California... I crank the guitar and let it fill every cranny of the car, and we speed off.
Is the music an appropriate soundtrack to his life today? I am helping him put together an evening presentation of the deplorable human rights situation in a far country. And tomorrow he is leaving the city, flying away to another place. He has nothing on his mind but suitcases and stress, and it is an effort to empathize, while my brain spins off into the sweet summer sunshine and relishes the steady beat.
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair...
He is talking about the catering, in between frantic sparks of conversation--"Oh, we're picking up the caterer as well?" I ask. Apparantly so. I fight amusement at his scattered bits of concentration, which collect and shred in turns, and his hands are slipping out the car window, grasping at handfuls of wind.
"I don't even want to leave."
"So why are you leaving then?"
He doesn't know, I realize suddenly. He spins off into a lengthy explanation but it is like an unravelling string of beads. He is listening to a restless, ticking clock that I can't hear.
When we find the caterer's apartment she approaches with a gap-toothed smile, lifting giant steaming pots with round arms, and I hastily make room in the trunk. Long trays of hot rice next, and then K. bundles her colourfully-wrapped person into the back of the car.
"Take the front," he protests, but K. is ensconsed in the back, smiling firmly.
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
On we go. Minutes blur and we are running, lifting, and finally we are set up and ready, with barely a minute to spare. The lids come off. Talk, presentation: we are riveted by the country we have come to hear about. Sounds of suffering.
I look over at him, on a whim, and he is flipping through his mental to-do list and his list actual; his brows are creased.
But K.--the caterer--is about to give testimony. She moves to the front of the room and smiles her gap-toothed smile and launches into broken English. "Ten minutes at most," she had told us before, but her ten minutes stretch double as her story trickles out. Finally--"I thank God. I thank Him most of all, for bringing me here! For finding me a church!" Her fifty-something years of tragedy have lined her face, touched her hair at the edges. She smiles.
When it is over-- "K., I'll take you home." It is time for goodbyes. But goodbyes are impossible.
And still those voices are calling from far away
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say...
Welcome, oh welcome. I'm so glad you've found a place here--I'm so glad.
We move outside, find vehicles, and K. bundles herself into my car again, and the heat has abated, leaving only a still twilight and cool relief. "Welcome."
But goodbye? That is harder, always harder. "Goodbye--keep in touch--God bless you--" It isn't enough. But it doesn't matter the words. Restless hearts don't hear goodbyes very well anyway, and it will be enough to know that words were said.
Last words, and then we are driving away, me and K., and I hear her beautiful contented silence. Perhaps she is remembering where she came from; perhaps she is looking at the city where she's been led and will never, now, leave.
Some dance to remember; some dance to forget...
A steady beat and the last of the day's sunshine; but tomorrow there will be more... My hands slip out the car window and grasp at streams of wind, not to hold on to them but to let them find their way through my fingers.
