Re-entry

Back in town for less than 24 hours and I'm sitting in an old high school gym waiting for the "music" to begin. I moved out of this town 5 years ago and looking around the crowded bleachers is like a time warp. My god, it feels like I never left as I see the same faces that I used to and will again, daily, for the foreseeable future. Five years and the circle is complete. I left here after a divorce suddenly shrank this already small island north of Seattle. It seems big enough again. Big enough to breathe and big enough to start over. And if I ride around it 10 times, big enough to feel like I'm on a bike tour...in Iceland! I am so NOT ready for the freezing wind and rain that has met me in the NW. OK, so it's in the 50's and cloudy and I'm whining but crap, I had a heat rash on my scrotum a week ago and now I almost miss it.
Sheryl, the woman who waited (sometimes patiently) six months for me to come home from Asia, and I are here to listen to her younger son Julian play the trumpet in his band concert. The kids look excited and anxious. The parents look more like...resolved. I mean, when is the last time you attended a 6th grade band concert. Sitting here it hits me that 5 years is a long time. The passage of time for me seems like a blink and the mirror doesn't change that much from day to day even though the grey is more prominent and the wrinkles deeper. But there are kids here playing a horribly arranged Star Wars theme who were just out of kindergarten when I left. It seems to me that their parents have changed much more drastically than I have as well. Of course they have. I'll never get old. I'm different than everyone else! Old acquaintances walk by. Whoa, is that...? Or, man, ...isn't looking so good these days.
Then I see him. Sitting there in the trumpet section playing 3rd trumpet. The smallest kid in the band, hunched over and reading his music with a nervous intensity. I can't tell if he is any good through the cacophony of mistuned wind and brass instruments but he is the clearest thing to a past life experience as I've had in a long time. This life, that is, in my past. Memories of being the small, scared, runt of the school playing in my first band concert, desperately seeking approval, flood my thoughts. I don't have any children of my own. How else can a 44 year old guy go on a trip for 6 months and be so "irresponsible"(and not be on a 'deadbeat dad' list somewhere)? So, I haven't been to a school event in a long time. I realized with some clarity that this concert (or football game or baseball game or debate) is one reason people have kids. To remember, to relive, to continue ones unrealized dreams through another. You get to hit the rewind button and play it all over again with a mini-me. For a few minutes I became that little kid as he played and struggled and persevered and stood up to take a bow. It was a sweet melancholy. I remembered how, even through my fear of making a fool of myself, I would come through and feel elated and feel the love of family, and feel successful. Of course the music was awful tonight, just as it was 33 years ago when I sat in that same chair in a different gym. But it sounded so sweet as I got lost in the drama of one kids struggle and in the drama of life continuing on just as it should. It's funny how we all torture ourselves voluntarily, in our own ways, and struggle so we can grow. Growth is a painful process so we hate it and yet crave it because without it we die. I realized this past year that pain, while not really a friend, is an ally. The changes I've experienced this year have been so enriching while also painful... whether through cycling, a crumpled relationship or some yoga asana that twists me in ways I don't want to be twisted. I have spent so much time avoiding that which helps me grow...hmmm. So this new pain of being cold all the time, and aimless, and unsure of what is next, and not cycling daily, and living in the "real" world again, and living "an ordinary life"...what lessons am I to learn from this time in my life?
I'll find out soon enough but in the meantime I'll just go play my trumpet with Julian and watch us both grow.