"You Can't Get Away From Yourself..."

In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises Jake says: 

“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

You learn that after the anticipation of moving and then arriving and wondering what will be different, some things just aren't:  Will my stomach hurt less?  Is it really my back that hurts or just the mattress at home, “well, we’ll see when we move to London.”

But the truth is, no matter where you go it all travels with you, the same Michigas and the same problems.  It's the back, it's the stomach.

You escape from the hustle of home, but soon any perceived tranquility is broken by the creation of the new life and then after living here a month you find yourself rushing home from work on a Friday for a dinner party, and the kids have to be picked up from play dates because the son has soccer in the morning and a daughter has a play date and there’s a new art class in Hampstead and we don’t know how to get there by bus.

Then the afternoon is full and you have to pick up the son from tennis and take a cab home because it’s late and you have Wicked tickets and traffic.  But after the show you have to get home because there’s more soccer on Sunday and Hebrew school and a museum tour and then you want to get to Camden Market before you go to meet friends for dinner and watch the end of the Chelsea/Man U game, but American football is starting and there’s Sunday night swim.

Side Bar (One of the nice things about dinner parties here is that Blackberrys are welcome.  I left a party for 30 minutes on Friday night to take a call outside and three other men were out there.  Everyone is from somewhere else, everyone has business back in the states, everyone understands.)

And when you finally get into bed Sunday night and you reflect on the weekend realizing it was different.  Amid all the chaos there was the walk home late Friday night with daughter number 1, and the Jewish Museum tour where she got a chance to show you what she knows.  There was the chance to watch football with your son, back at home he would have been out.  And the piggyback rides with daughter number two as you explored (and got lost) walking through Hampstead Heath.

Individually we may be the same but our family’s life is different, richer.