Nott What You'd Expected...

Coming home to the Shire (or) Hobbit Syndrome

Go ahead, ask it. It's on the tip of your tongue. Everyone else has, I'm surprised it's taken you this long...

You: "You excited to go back home?"
Me: "Home? As in...."
You: " You know, America... near Canada... speak English..."
Me: "Oh, yeah, yeah right... America, sure.. Iowa, of course..."
You: " Remember? Obesity, pricey prescription drugs, actual guns, Church?"
Me: "Oh, yeah...No, I remember... I was just distracted by the sounds of ice cream trucks outside and rain on the sunroof.."
You: " Rain? What's that like? England must suck with all that crappy weather!"
Me: "Yeah... aside from the lack of winter.... Have I mentioned the daffodils in February?"
You: "And the food.... it must be awful!"
Me: "Best Indian food you'll ever have... Where did that rumor about bad food start?"
You: "So when's the flight?"

(and scene)

I'm not sure how I feel right now. You know where dead babies used to go when they died, babies that were not baptised yet, but old enough to be racked with the oppressive guilt of original sin? The place that existed before the Pope got rid of it last month? Limbo was it?

Yeah... I feel like I'm in limbo. I won't try to assign the labels of 'hell' or 'purgatory' or 'semi-heaven' to each locale (although Kevin Costner would be quick to point out that Iowa has a head start in the Heaven department)... There is a very strange, looming quality about the end of the journey.
I dread leaving most because at times I honestly can't remember what home is like. I remember it, but the details are exaggerated. Things are bigger, smaller, more impressive, more depressing than they actually are. My schema (philosophy majors?) are out of whack. My comparisons no longer include only Chicago, Decorah, Minneapolis, Colorado (yes, I realize this is a state), and Des Moines. My experiences are not limited to one continent or even one hemisphere. At the risk of sounding like the cocky bastard I'm dreading I've become, it's very possible that A) I'll feel insignificant and small back in Iowa, or B) I'll come to regret the things I did not take advantage of here in Notts.

I don't mean to say that Iowa is easy to forget, or that all of my life experiences are slipping away, but for the past year, this is all I've known. It's even at the point where, when looking at old pictures from this fall, I can hardly remember it- It's like in the opening credits of Duck Tales when the brick bridge starts collapsing as they run across it- I'm outpacing my past, but only fast enough to not fall into the lava. I would say that I'm verging on 'too deep', but the reference to Duck Tales has to take it down a few notches.
I'm afraid of Hobbit Syndrome... a aptly named disorder first discussed in Florence with Aaron and Hilary in which, after destroying the ring and returning to the 'shire, Frodo and his hobbity friends share a bond between themselves- a bond forged in life-threatening battle, journeys no man has ever seen, etc- but completely unknown by the barmaids, town drunks, or other friends from the past.
Will we become hobbits, so engrossed in our past experiences that we can't take things for what they are, or will we (like the jolly brave hobbit who approaches the barmaid with new found confidence after his worldly travels) take life by the proverbial horns and suck the marrow out of its bony...worldness... ? Time will tell... 24 days time to be exact. (not that anyone's counting)
::UPDATE:: Hilary has just informed me that schema, as used earlier in the post, is actually a term used in psychology. I'll keep it as 'philosophy' for the sole purpose of maintaining a sort of realism that only mistakes can provide.... leave it to future textual criticism to figure out which word I actually meant....

posted by Kevin @ 4:09 PM