#SOL17: Comfort

After the Suburbs (M.A. Reilly)

Country comfort's in a truck that's going home.  - Bernie Taupin/Elton John  

I.

"Well, home is home," my son tells me with such an earnest expression as he explains why he would prefer to commute to college. I am surprised by this--thinking he would want to live away at school.

But he tells me so simply, Home is home.

Indeed.

II.

And home is also comfort. Even now after Rob's death, this home we made is comfort. And I am so glad that I stopped ridding the house of reminders of my husband's death and let it all just stand as it is. At first I thought I did this out of fatigue, but now I think that perhaps, just perhaps there was bit of wisdom guiding my hand. I'm relived that I did not act on selling the house, but rather decided to make no changes.  

This is home.

Of the many things I miss when I think of Rob, it is the routine comforts he offered, gave, and took that resonate the most. After nearly 30 years, such comfort is love actualized. Home is its location. No one knows me as he did. No one knew him as I did. There's such intimacy in knowing, in caring, in loving, in comforting. And I miss all of that. 

III.

It is the simple things--the ones I took for granted that now most carry the reminder of loss. The cup of tea brewed just right and placed in a favorite mug. The newspaper retrieved from the front yard early in the morning and separated with the sections I read first on top. It's coming home late at night and finding the front light turned on. It's his homemade beef stew steaming in a pot on the stove in the winter, or sun tea brewing in a jar in the summer. It's a book I did not know I would want to read sitting on the kitchen table or all us tucked up in the house, safe during a fall Nor'Easter. Once, it was a book of maps left open to a marked page we later would travel to.

IV.

As Rob was dying I looked around our home and thought how the stuff we had accumulated meant so little. He would take none of it with him. It is the ordinary experiences that framed our lives that matter now. I think how these gestures were less about things and more about the expressions of love they marked. 

V.

Its mid-winter and the cold seeps through the windows, slips in under the side door. Water trickles through the radiators and the afternoon light, Hopper-thin, leaves the sky later and later. Nearly a year has passed since his death and I have such need for comfort. Sorrow dogs my steps reminding me of where we were a year ago.  I can't recall if Rob ever said good-bye to me. It seems that he was somewhat lucid for most mornings during those last days at home, and then not lucid at all. 

I can't recall the last things we said. 
I can't recall. 

Could Frank Bruni Be Any More Wrong?

(M.A. Reilly, 2008)

In today's opinion column, The Wilds of Education, Frank Bruni asserts:

While these efforts differ greatly, they overlap in their impulse to edit the world to the comfort of students, and that’s especially troubling in this day and age, when too many people use technology and the Internet to filter a vast universe of information and a multitude of perspectives into only what they want to hear, a tidy, cozy echo chamber of affirmation.

Bruni's misreading here is classic. He references several current educational happenings in an attempt to demonstrate that parents are coddling the kids and that 'people' are already employing technological methods to filter their world.  The parents in the Dallas suburb Bruni references who are suppressing high school students'  right to read seven (7) titles are not about the comfort of students.

Denying another access to print has never been about the comfort of other.

The conservative Jefferson County BOE who wants to limit materials that “encourage or condone civil disorder" are not motivated by children's comfort. There, BOE member Julie Williams and her panel are reviewing history curricula in order to ensure that " 'positive aspects' of U.S. heritage that 'promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.' Materials should not, it says, 'encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.'" (from here). 

Revisionist history has never been about the comfort of other.

Bruni asks: "Isn’t education supposed to provoke, disrupt, challenge the paradigms that young people have consciously embraced and attack the prejudices that they have unconsciously absorbed?" 

And the answer here is not quite.  

Yes, an education can provoke, disrupt, and challenge and democracies with public education are better served by ensuring that such disruption is possible, if not probable.  In the situations Bruni cites, it is not the youth who are asking to be shielded, but rather their parents and adult community members who are reducing freedom in order to maintain a status quo.  

Let's not call this comforting the kids.