A Birthday Card...

Today Carol saved my afternoon...

I got a call last night from Eric that ended with a reassurance that it was alright if I didn't get back to him right away.

"...cause today has been like the worst day of my life..."

The statement tripped me up for a second... possibly because I was, by this point in the evening, quite nicely dosed, but more probably because prior to eruption of birthday festivities in my honor I had been feeling something very much akin to the anxiousness I heard in Eric's words. Finals are upon us once again... like a heavy cloud of noxious gas that forces you into a corner and demands that you cough up everything everything you posess in the vain hopes that it will eventually dissipate.

This morning I woke up. Twenty-One. Blip. Now my brief reprieve had gone and I was thrust suddenly back into the cloud.

Class is never a helpful activity once one has become firmly confined to the cloud. The goals are clear, the topics have all been covered, further learning is at a virtual standstill. The date printed on the plane ticket in the back of your mind has begun to correspond to the dates at the distant margin of the extended weather forecast. If one could simply hop into a cocoon for what will look in a week and a half like the latest tick mark on an endless list of indistinguishable weeks of academic discomfort then everything would certainly pan out.

The clock strikes one, Peanut and I collect our things and exit our temporary cell for the march back to one of several available prisons.

"Library..." He mumbles, and I nod acknowledgment mumble something that vaguely resembles "Dorm". We gesture and part, telling our respective selves that if work goes well this afternoon we'll all get together in the evening and distract one another.

Now my mind drifts, and I only catch up with myself to notice that I'm not really walking toward the dorm, but toward the mailroom. I reach inside the slot and grasp the thick, precisely folded paper of a greeting card. I pull out my knife and open the purple envelope. There will be money; there's no time given to questions concerning currency. It's the guts that count, the loopy scrawl of one Thompson parent or the other bringing words of encouragement, idiom, cynicism, cliché, nostalgia.

The colorful exterior, containing a joke about college and its implications in the new world of public drinking, gives way to a tundra-like emptiness of the thick paper, punctuated only by the words "Happy 21st Birthday" in a monospaced Courier.

Beneath this lettering Carol's note reads:

Let the Happy Hour Begin!
Eric and I started without you but I have a beer with your name on it, so I am expecting a visit sometime over Christmas. It has been quite dull drinking alone but now we can really make Steve pout!
No Grilled Cheese this year -- I figured you could use some moola for whatever -- $21 of course because my "Doris Jr. OC" disorder is surfacing!
Hope you are surviving finals and papers. See you soon.
Love,
The Thompson Clan


Things will change this Christmas. Things have already changed. I am renewed. Maybe this year "home" will bring us something more fulfilling than the gentle back-and-forth rocking of displeasure that compels us to leave and then once more to return. I feel good. I feel hungry.

The cloud will squeeze and I will swelter, pouring my essence onto paper, draining so many bullet points out on to the cumulative outline of "achievement". And then I'll dry off and come home to the place where change and stagnation meet each other in comforting equilibrium.