Nostalgia pulls at me. Yesterday, I claimed my daily cache at the foot of a mural. In this case, the mural was both familiar and unfamiliar in equal measure. The mural lives on a wall of a library I have visited since my childhood. I still remember when it was bare and clean, only bearing the name of the building. Once I was a little older but still a child, a mural was painted on it featuring Martin Luther King and a number of other figures and motifs from the Black struggle for civil rights. The mural was touched up to add new things or when the weather took a toll. When the building was torn down to update the physical infrastructure, the original wall and mural were retained and incorporated into the new building. As the years progressed, items and motifs of Latino heritage were added or replaced sections. And so, I returned to see it again, completely different and completely expected. After I signed the log, I turned around to look at the neighborhood. Brand new apartments were being built on the street where my great-grandparents lived. The pizza place across the street that opened when I was a boy is now a storied Austin institution. As the hipsters have moved in over the last decades, the street signs and road markings are newer and bike lanes exist. But I see through the newness. I see the bones beneath the glitz and glamour. And I remember.
Responsibility pulls at me. As the Central Texas Representative for the TXGA, it is my responsibility this year to plan our fall event, the Lone Star Roundup. I don’t know if you have ever planned a large (though not even close to Mega) Event before, but it’s not a small thing. I’m still in the early stages, long before minutiae start nibbling at me like ducks, and it has already become a little draining. I can’t tell if it’s the thing itself (which I doubt) or my own personal ebbs and flows of energy and attention (which is where I’d place my money). I’ve already figured out that I’m wanting more time because it feels like it’s slipping away, yet I’m ready to be done with it and have this burden lifted from me. I do have time, and it is for me to wear this yoke at the moment. I’ve also figured out why doing things like this in Austin is not usually a great idea. Part of it is because it’s not uncommon with these annual events for the host town to take an interest in it for the community, maybe even have a little buy-in both for public relations and economic reasons. But for a city of this size, our combined output is a rounding error compared to other things going on. Part of it is because of our timing. Roundup traditionally happens around the same time as the Austin City Limits Music Festival and Texas Challenge at the same time as South by Southwest, events that have little overlap with our demographic but also draw much of the oxygen from the event atmosphere of the area. Regardless, many of my fellow cachers are counting on me. I cannot and will not let them down.
Work pulls at me. I certainly don’t mean my job, though that takes a bit of a toll. I mean my work, which in this case means my book. I’m sure many of you have a great goal or endeavor that is a driver of your existence. This is one of mine. I don’t know if any of you have ever written a book before, but just getting words down on the page, while laudable in itself, isn’t all there is to it. Having gone over the bulk of it to edit once, I find myself needing to do it again and make more edits. It’s not exactly a case of killing my darlings (some must live, or it would not be my work), but it is a second great slog through places I have previously trod to prune things that are and at times plant things that never were. But how else will it be done if I do not do it? Sure, it would be easy enough to leave it as it is, say it is done, and let the words and pages fall where they may, but that would be both a betrayal of myself and my readers. Delusions of grandeur aside, how can I expect it to last through the ages if I do not treat it thus? Therefore, I must polish my words again. How else can I expect them to shine? But, just like polishing silver or a boot, it takes a lot of time and a lot of repetitive action.
Longing pulls at me. The road, that most persistent of lovers, beckons. How I wish I could just get in a car and drive. So many undiscovered counties lay waiting for me. Unfortunately, the needs of home keep me here (for a while longer, anyway), while the politics of the moment disincentivize going to other places (neither Tennessee nor Mississippi has been feeling like especially good places to go lately, and they are my closest opportunities for more counties). Despite all that, I want nothing more than to drop everything and take to the highways and byways. Not since my Washington trip in August have I been able to go, and believe me when I tell you that there is little in this world I want more than to see more courthouses, stand in more counties, devour more states, and find more far-flung caches therein.
I am pulled in so many directions, so many vectors attempting to change my course. And yet, they come to equilibrium. I remain seated here, moving neither one way nor another. What wonders could be wrought if one would only snap or pull more strongly than the rest?
Geocaching While Black 