Sharing...

I am all over the place in my mind this week (what's new). Words like story, relationship, isolation, journeys, sharing, and gifts are bouncing around in my head along with a head cold and too much coffee... 

Facebook: This week I shared the  following status update on Facebook: Next five days... married for 17, together for 23, sober for 25. Just a little bragging here.  Thanks Kat and all the rest who are the glue in those crazy numbers. I am not one to normally count "Likes" too much, but I was taken aback by the percentage of my friends list took a moment to click (14.6% for those who like statistics). What was it that resonated with a big chunk of my "friends"? I am assuming it is a combination of several things; the components might be... The approval of my long marriage with Kat? The support for my sobriety? The participation in being some of the glue? At the heart of all of these reasons is relationships. Relationships are what people make with each other. The need for meaningful relationships is so critical for our well-being. I am reminded of the lesson offered in the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Here is part of the plot summary found on Wikipedia of the movie made from Krakauer's book: 

MAJOR SPOILER TO FOLLOW: IF YOU PLAN TO READ THE BOOK OR WATCH THE MOVIE YOU MAY NOT WANT TO READ THE NEXT FEW PARAGRAPHS. (If you do not wish to read the spoiler, listen to Eddie Vedder's beautiful piece from the movie, Society.)

In May 1992, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) arrives in a remote area just north of the Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and sets up a campsite in an abandoned bus, which he calls The Magic Bus. At first, McCandless is content with the isolation, the beauty of nature around him, and the thrill of living off the land. He hunts wild animals with a .22 caliber rifle, reads books, and keeps a diary of his thoughts as he prepares himself for a new life in the wild. 

Four months later at the abandoned bus, life for McCandless becomes harder and he becomes less discerning. As his supplies begin to run out, he realizes that nature is also harsh and uncaring. In the pain of realization, McCandless concludes that true happiness can only be found when shared with others and seeks to return from the wild to his friends and family.... ....Slowly dying, he continues to document his process of self-realization and accepts his fate, as he imagines his family for one last time. He writes a farewell to the world and crawls into his sleeping bag to die.

END OF SPOILER ZONE

Isolation and Sharing: True happiness can only be found when shared with others. That's the wisdom. We are social. It is in our nature to be social. Isolation at times is excellent. Travel with oneself is critical. Sitting quietly, alone is essential for so many of us. But we always need to return to someone or make new connections to share those quiet or isolated moments with others. 

eric: I am not sure how to communicate how each of these elements connect, but I wish to offer a short story from Shaun Tan again to finish off this entry (I opened my blog in September with Tan's artwork). This story, called eric, comes for the collection tales from outer suburbia (from which the main element of my blog banner was also taken). 

I think the "liking" of my anniversaries on Facebook, the wonderful and varied relationships I have in life, Christopher McCandless' isolation and final denumal, and eric's visit in our country all converge on what I have swirling in my head today. Here's eric. Enjoy.  

---

eric

some years ago we had a foreign exchange student come 

to live with us. We found it very difficult to pronounce 

his name correctly, but he didn't mind. 

He told us to just call him "Eric."

---

We had repainted the spare room, bought new rugs and furniture,

and generally made sure everything would be comfortable

for him. So I can't say why it was that Eric chose to sleep and

study most to the time in our kitchen pantry.

"It must be cultural thing," said Mum. "As long as he is happy."

We started storing food and kitchen things in other

cupboards so we wouldn't disturb him.

---

But sometimes I wondered if Eric was happy; he was so polite

that I'm not sure he would have told us if something bothered him.

A few times I saw him through the pantry door gap, studying with silent

intensity, and imagined what it might be like for him here in our country.

Secretly I had been looking forward to having a foreign visitor

— I had so many things to show him. For once I could be a local

expert, a fountain of interesting facts and opinions. Fortunately, 

Eric was very curious and always had plenty of questions.

---

However, they weren't the kind of questions I had been expecting

Most of the time I could only say,

"I'm not really sure," or, "That's just how it is."

I didn't feel very helpful at all.

---

I had planned for us to go on a number of weekly

excursions together, as I was determined to show our

visitor the best places in the city and its surrounds.

I think Eric enjoyed these trips, but once again,

it was hard to really know.

---

---

Most of the time Eric seemed more 

interested in small things he 

discovered on the ground.

I might have found this a little 

exasperating, but I kept thinking 

about what Mum had said, 

about the cultural thing. 

Then I didn't mind so much.

Nevertheless, none of us could help 

but be bewildered by the way Eric 

left our home: a sudden departure 

early one morning, with little more 

than a wave and a polite good-bye.

---

It actually took us a while to realize he wasn't coming back.

---

---

     There was much speculation over dinner later

that evening. Did Eric seem upset? Did he enjoiy

his stay? Would we ever heard rom him again?

     An uncomfortable feeling hung in the air, like 

something unfinished, unresolved. It bothered us 

for hours, or at least until one of us discovered what 

was in the pantry.

     Go and see for yourself: It's still there after all these 

years, thriving in the darkness. It's the first thing we 

show any new visits to our house. "Look what our 

foreign exchange student left for us," we tell them.

     "It must be a cultural thing,' says Mum.

---

The Arrival...

From The Arrival by Shaun Tan

A few years back I succumbed to an impulse that had been itching me since I was in college; I began looking at graphic novels. Perhaps it was a combination of a college friend who implored me to read Sandman, a boss who was obsessed with Batman, countless hours of reading and listening to children's stories as my kids devoured books of all kinds, and/or a colleague who began teaching the graphic novel in high school ELA. But at some point I became less ashamed to admit that a great graphic novel was on my list of what-I-did-over-summer-vacation conversations with my students in 9th and 10th grade.

The turning point for me was when I "read" the wordless book The Arrival by Shaun Tan. I was floored by how this book sucked me in, resulting in multiple quick-succession reads. My son and I spend hours talking about the drawings (while I felt an intense jealousy of Mr. Tan's abilities). I had a light bulb moment when I asked my very young (maybe four year's old?) daughter to tell me the story she saw in the panels. Her rendering of the tale was so full of insight I had to credit the author with presenting us with something unique and wondrous while simultaneously accessible and familiar. I have yet to use the book in my 10th grade class as a fiction of the immigration story, but I have turned many of my charges on to Mr. Tan's body of work.

I started this blog years ago in an attempt to learn something new in the world of "tools for communication". Three of us jumped in one afternoon and crafted the first run of blogs that would eventually develop into:

• Murder Ballad Monday: Reflections on the tougher side of old, weird America (and the British Isles) 

• Greylock Snow Day: The expert weather predictors at Greylocksnowday have been forecasting the likelihood of snow days since the Blizzard of 1978. In that time, we have correctly predicted delays, early dismissals, and full snow days at an amazing 97.65% rate.

From The Arrival by Shaun Tan

• "History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.": My blog which I neglected to feed and which withered up to die a sad unobserved interwebs death... 

The first two are quite successful in having developed avid followings, and each in their own way are excellent examples of quality story telling. Referencing The Arrival as a comeback post for my defunct blog seems appropriate. It is both random and purposeful, which sums up precisely what I strive to be daily. It is about a man who "is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope."

Good story telling is an art. Story is at the heart of what I do, teaching social studies, and I have been thinking about how to improve my story telling lately, learning from my talented story telling colleagues. There is a lot of study, debate, and reaction to an education system that has yet to agree on what, how, and why we do what we do. What I have come to understand is that as we have strived for increasing coverage, we have sacrificed story. My professional work is to find balance, but on my summer vacation, reading work like The Arrival is gloriously delightful and meaningful.

Here is Wikipedia's entry:

The Arrival (graphic novel)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a wordless "graphic novel" published by Hodder's Children's books in 2006. The book is 128 pages long and divided into six chapters; it is composed of small, medium, and large panels, and often features pages of full artwork. It features an immigrant’s life in an imaginary world that sometimes vaguely resembles our own. Without the use of dialogue or text, Tan portrays the experience of a father immigrating to a new land.^[1] Tan differentiates The Arrival from children's picture books, explaining that there's more emphasis on continuity in texts with multiple frames and panels, and that a "graphic novel" text like his more closely resembles a film making process.^[2] Shaun Tan has said he wanted his book to build a kind of empathy in readers: "In Australia, people don’t stop to imagine what it’s like for some of these refugees. They just see them as a problem once they’re here, without thinking about the bigger picture. I don’t expect the book to change anybody’s opinion about things, but if it at least makes them pause to think, I’ll feel as if I’ve succeeded in something."^[3]

Synopsis[edit]

The Arrival tells a universal story of immigration. The protagonist, a young man, leaves his troubled homeland in search of a new home for his wife and daughter. His homeland is haunted by shadowy, spiky tails that weave in and out of the city, giving the sense that he is trying to help his family escape a malevolent force. In subsequent parts of the book, the man encounters cultural and language barriers characterized by strange creatures and unrecognizable objects, making it a struggle for him to find work and room and board. The man also encounters friendly strangers that share their accounts of immigrating from troubled homelands. The "graphic novel" conveys messages of solitude, alienation, and hope in a foreign land.^[4]

Style[edit]

Tan sets the mood of each scene with sepia-tone color schemes, ranging from grayscale to bright gold. The illustrations are reminiscent of aged photos, and often feature realistic looking humans in abstract and bizarre environments. The environments resemble a combination of futuristic and old fashioned aesthetics.^[4] Tan's process was one that used real-life models to create a storyboard. He also shot pictures in his garage, using a video camera and empty boxes to create lighting.^[5] Shaun Tan has commented on the reason for this process: “I was very dependent on photography for a lot of the drawings, because they’re photo-realistic. It’s not my favorite style of working, and I didn’t feel very confident. The other thing was continuity. When I started, I was drawing everything out of my head by hand, and I was finding that there were accumulating continuity problems--just little things that you notice subconsciously, like the length of a sleeve, how a lapel falls, where the rim of a hat is. The only way to register all of that properly was to photograph a lot of the stuff"^[3] Shaun Tan has commented that he was influenced by The Snowman by Raymond Briggs.^[6]