It's called Déjà Vu. That feeling you've
been somewhere before, seen these sights and walked the streets that are
undoubtedly foreign yet seemingly so familiar. I've had this experience from time
to time, aroused by curious circumstance that introduces me to hazy memories
that could pass for either reality or dreams. Its surreal nature eludes
detection. Its timing always so curious, never announcing its arrival or caring
to stay too long. Never betraying which memories are real and which are simply
remembered in the moment they are created.
Déjà Vu. It's happening to me again,
right now in fact as I drive down Interstate 66, retracing the steps I long
abandoned some four years ago. Through miles of tiny Virginia towns I drive,
the line between reality and dreams blurring into the white stripes of pavement
that melt beneath my tires. Alabama is far in the distance now, no longer
visible in the rear view mirror that has fogged over from my breath that now
runs fast and deep. I wipe the mirror clean and see a street sign in its
reflection: Centreville. Not much further to go now. Past Dulles and Fairlakes I
drive until finally my old home awaits, just as I remembered it. Fairfax
Virginia, at last I come back to thee. Back to DC and back to a life I thought
had passed away all those many years ago. For better or worse I have made my
decision and now must face the consequences and whatever fate may await.
"Either I'm dead right or I'm
crazy!" a man once said. I'll tip my hat to you Jimmy and see you on the
other side.
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When I was in high school I was
fortunate enough to have a single teacher whose capacity for wisdom was matched
only by his ease of dispensing it. He was a small man, no more than five and a
half feet tall, but he strolled the school halls with the swagger of a man
twice his height. His possessed a confidence about him, a confidence secured by
a thorough understanding of not only humanity, but also himself. He was a man
who had spent a great deal of time in self-reflection and had come to
understand the workings of his fellow man in a way most people can never even
imagine.
He was also a man who loved to tell
stories. One day he told the class that as a young man of only eighteen he had
been on a train passing through the desolate expanses of south Georgia. For
those of you who are unaccustomed to this area, south Georgia is a great
wasteland of one horse towns and endless forests and swamps that have yet to be
tamed by civilized man. As his train passed through this area, my teacher looked
out the window to see other men just as himself toiling in the hot southern sun
as they drained swamps and worked in the muck to ready the ground for the next
set of passenger rails that would eventually be built alongside the single
track. The work was brutal. Swarms of mosquitoes pestered the men's every move
and red clay baked onto exhausted arms so that it finally matched the color of
their sunburned skin. For eight hours a day they toiled in near slave labor to
finish building the rail line that still had another year before its
completion. The men looked at the passenger train as it passed and glanced at
my teacher.
"I'll never do that," he
thought to himself, almost aghast at how anyone could work in such treacherous
conditions. He lowered the curtain of his train window and fell soundly asleep.
A year later he saw those men again,
only this time it was not from the comfort of a passenger train. He saw them up
close as he was now counted among them. For in the year since shaking his head
in disbelief at how anyone could do such a horrid job, his father had been laid
off and money around his household became tight. Just on the cusp of graduating
high school, the only way now for him to attend college was to pay for it with
his own money. After numerous attempts to find a job, he found that the only
business that was hiring was the rail line. With no other chance to find work,
if he wanted to go to college he would now have to do the one job he told
himself he never would. With shovel in hand he sent himself through college.
"Never say what you won't do,"
he told our class that day. "You'll usually be wrong."
I told a girl once what I wouldn't do. I
told her that I would never return to DC. My path led elsewhere, I said, away from
the treasured monuments of glories past and the shattered hopes I felt had
always been but a fool's paradise. In the land of my fathers I would return to reclaim
my battered glory and finally seize for myself that measure of pride that had
forever remained so elusive. I would return to Alabama and settle amongst those
kindred spirits whose peculiar habits I know so well, never venturing away
again lest the world clip the wings that had only just begun to spread.
Yet I came back. In spite of all my uncertainty
and misgivings I came back. And in truth, just as I was when my path first took
me down this road all those years ago, I am still fearful of what challenges
may yet come. But those fears must be ignored, cast aside to reveal the great
adventures that lie just beyond.
I was afraid. I was afraid to come back.
That is why I always had to.
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