I've always loved family dinners. It's hard to not, except maybe when you're an angsty high school kid for whom family dinners may only mean an impediment to getting ready for self-concious social gatherings. That may have been me, once upon a time. But these days--today--a family dinner with my borrowed family discussing governent spending and my little brother's tears and hair color and even Southern Boy, once or twice--was exactly what I needed to help me digest the past the two weeks.
So maybe the reason last weekend was so hard was because it was coming off of one that was so easy. A trip to Avila and Salamanca, complete with four-star accomodations, statues venerated by holy people, the perfect (albeit, out of place) Irish pub with the perfect, embracing atmosphere to lend to that kind of conversation where you look into the person's eyes sitting across from you and you just know that they really hear you. Tapas bar hopping and learning about the lives of the bartenders. Surprise Lauds, complete with chanting Spaniard priests and incense, before a Mass during which you look around and discover that the majority of the congregation is made up of the reverent faces of your classmates, smiling with realization once the profound and oh-so-applicable message of the priest begins to resound in their amature-Spanish processing centers.
It really was difficult for anything to live up to that weekend. Oktoberfest could have been fun. Would have been fun. Was fun, in a lot of different ways. But it would be dishonest of me to say that I didn't leave the weekend with a bad taste in my mouth. A lot happened--too much for me to make known to the general public--but suffice it to say that at certain points, I couldn't handle the lack of respect for human dignity. The way people ride on their blessings as if they deserve them. How people cry over and over again to value life at it beginning and end but forget a lot about the middle. How people love incompletely and don't realize it until it's too late.
"Not everyone in this world is going to be Renee," my mom said to me, as I desperately sobbed to her for 50 cents a minute in the middle of the Brussels airport (crying is a universal language, I've come to learn; people from all over the world know to leave you a ten foot diameter). She was, of course, referring to my best friend, who loves and loves and simply doesn't know how to stop. And she's right--my mom, I mean, and that shouldn't be a sad thing but rather the most joyful--that I am so blessed to know someone who loves to an almost saccharine point, so that, in comparison, everything else comes across as more tragic than it should. In fact, I know more than one person like that. I know a group of people who will literally sprint with you to the latest Sunday Mass Toledo offers you're too flustered at the fact that you might miss the Eucharistic prayer and there's no way a weekend like the one you just had would end in missing Sunday Mass. I know a cab driver who'll let five college kids smelling as if they've camped and gone to a beer festival and slept in tents for three days get away with not paying the full fare. I know a Mom and a Dad and an Hermanito who don't really speak the same language as you but bring exactly the right amount of comfort that you need by simply having a hot dinner ready when you get home.
I have so many blessings. I need to stop acting as if I deserve them.
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