The other day, I shared a post I’d made 5 years ago as part of a writing challenge I’d given myself in 2020 called Twenty Weeks of Gratitude. It was a memory of project I worked on in 2015, which had roots in prior work I’d started 5 years before that, so you can imagine how everything might feel like a lifetime ago. Like a door that keeps revolving in a half-forgotten dream, or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream, etc.
I recorded these videos when these threads unexpectedly came together while I was in Lebanon last. I’m still not sure if I can post about it, but they were recorded for a thing that’s coming up in the first week of May. Something I didn’t plan for or work towards, or really get much out of, but it still warms my heart. Nothing goes to waste. It just changes form.
Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel. Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel.
“Sing me a song of the Revolution
Marching like fire over the world,
Weaving from the earth its bright red banner
For the hands of the masses to unfurl.”(Langston Hughes)
I took these in my little home office with my old Canon PowerShot last night. It’s the same camera I used to document my first days researching public transport in Lebanon some 15 years ago. My interests have changed over the years, but not by a whole lot. The same red thread runs through it all.
It’s become clearer to me lately how this thread is more than intellectual; it’s a tether to the one-half of me that is my father. It’s gotten itself tangled in all kinds of new directions, but it’s still there, keeping the story together.
If you’re looking for me, you’ll find me in my new favorite room. But if the Feds come knocking, tell them I’m not home.
Today is also my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary.
I recorded this across the street from our home. It’s where I waited for the bus to take me to Beirut while I was there last. It’s an example of how “stops” work there; buses stop anywhere.
It wasn’t a very good video because only one bus had passed by the time I got tired of recording. But I kept it anyway because I was waiting across the street from our home.
And today is my parents’ ruby anniversary.