Carry every sadness...

One of my current favorite songs is an older one (2002? I think?) - "Half Acre" by Hem, which I guess is kind of a folkie band? I'm not sure how you'd classify them - they have sort of that jingly twee sound to some of their music, and a lot of it uses acoustic instruments and is kind of mid-paced and peaceful and I like it. (I should look for bands similar, maybe Bon Iver....I don't listen to a lot of pop these days but I like this kind).

Anyway, I listen to "Half Acre" by Hem a lot, at least several times a week, lately:



It's become one of those "touchstone" songs for me. I've listened to it when sad and sometimes cried (even though it's fundamentally a hopeful song), and at other times it's made me feel better.

Particularly this lyric:

"So we carry every sadness with us/Every hour our heart were broken/ Every night the fear and darkness/Lay down with us"

And man, guys, this timeline. Stuff in the news. So far this fall I've been reminded of some of the ways I was bullied as a kid, of the time when a boy in seventh grade low-level .... I hesitate to say 'sexually abused' but it was frottage and I guess that counts...me in front of other kids for a laugh.

I also remember that one of my junior high science teachers wound up in prison ("inappropriate relationship" with a couple of his female students). That happened apparently years after I left that school, but I always got a creepy vibe (even as innocent as I was) off of him. I also disliked his style of teaching: give very vague assignments, some of which seemed to be set up to make the perfectionist students fail at them, and also, he told people "stuff isn't due until the last day of the marking period" and there was just a box you stuffed the assignments in and he didn't look at them, and I always worried one of mine would get lost. (And yeah, as much as anything, when I wake up in the middle of the night wailing "IS *EVERYONE* TERRIBLE?" this is one of the people I think of. I joked that 2017 would turn me Calvinist - in the sense of believing in total human depravity - but maybe that joke wasn't so far from the truth)

And now, today, something reminded me of a grad-school prof I had.

He came with great promise. It turned out he either was, or became while he was there, an alcoholic. And now I remember the whole sad story. That he was sometimes not the most coherent in class (I remember having to teach myself a lot of the material and some of it I never mastered). That a student once said "Dr. (redacted) is great! Not every professor will go out drinking with undergrads!" and even then, even as a younger and more-foolish person than I am now, I thought there's a reason they don't. And how the individual in question racked up enough DUIs that he lost his license, and even got one on a bike. And how he was cited for "indecent exposure" (or so the rumor went) after forgetting to zip up when visiting the restroom at a local bar.

Eventually, the person was non-renewed (there was a system, as I remember, where you had a three-year probationary contract and IF you passed the probie period, you could then apply for tenure). It was on the basis of classroom performance, as I remember, but I suspect the outside behavior contributed.

It was just sad. I don't know if the other faculty tried to intervene. I think the person's "mentor" did a little bit, but it wasn't enough, I guess.

Last I heard, the person in question wound up in prison in another state for behaviors related to his drinking.

I mean, on the one hand, yes, he served an important cautionary tale to the would-be professors among us, but it was just SAD. And thinking of it again makes me sad all over again.

So many broken people in this world...

Then again, that song I quoted - which I said was fundamentally hopeful - ends like this:

"But I am holding half an acre/Torn from the map of Michigan/I am carrying this scrap of paper/That can crack the darkest sky wide open/Every burden taken from me/Every night my heart unfolding/

My home"

And yeah, there are those touchstones that can help restore us a little bit. It's just, with some of these memories, places I think of as having been "home" in the past, don't seem so much "home" any more. (I think of the movie "Inside Out," and Sadness touching some of the happy memories and turning them sad. Maybe that's more metaphorical for adulthood than the animators intended originally....)

I don't know. On the one hand, I remember singing "The World is not My Home" in Sunday School as a wee one, but on the other hand, I gotta live here while I live here, and I do wish I felt more at home some days....