Ancient Logic

Of all of the various rituals and ceremonies the end of the year brings to someone involved with public education, perhaps none is more bitter sweet than the retirement party. In schools, retirement parties always happen in June and represent one of the few occasions when the old and the young stand elbow to elbow, obliged to consider the same ancient fact: people grow old, change, and leave behind legacies in the memories of their friends. This year was an unusually big retirement party, four veteran teachers leaving us, and so the party was larger, longer, and more diverse. As I was standing in the company of teachers that I could barely recognize hailing from decades before I came to my school, I struck by two conversations. The first, quickly paraphrased, erupted when four teachers roughly my age realized that we all enjoy Game of Thrones, having read the books, and actively followed the HBO series. So for the next twenty minutes everyone shared their favorite character...

Every once in awhile I'll run into a new word that will stick with me for a while. This word, hiraeth , is Welsh and represents one of those innumerable words that fall into broad category one might call 'unenglishable.' Essentially the word is homesickness tinged with nostalgia, a wistful ache for something that wasn't ever actually experienced. There's a kind of tragic tone to the word as it often describes the feeling Welsh people feel for a homeland that was absorbed a long, long time ago into England. Not so coincidentally, I consider myself Welsh in background. I'm a lot of things actually, Irish, Swedish, Scottish but, somehow my parent's calculation that I was at least 40% Welsh always resonated with me. Now, mind you, I never made the slightest effort to actually learn  anything about my supposed homeland, allowing it to remain some hazy realm filled with scraps of hills and valleys, red dragons and an almost comically opaque language. Welsh...

A fun word floated to the top of my head today: Wabi-sabi. It's Japanese, referring to an imperfect, transient melancholy, basically the mood I get into every October around this time. The Wiki on it is pretty good but here's a moment I think defines the word for me: I was walking back to my apartment where I lived for a year in Japan. I turned a corner and saw this flash of red pass in front of my eyes. A red butterfly, seized by the wind. I froze, watching it flutter down to the sidewalk in front of me. Touching ground it became a red momiji leaf.