Difficult

Apparently America is “fireflies in June” amongst other things. Those other things include, “kids selling lemonade in a front yard, farms and cities, high school proms.” The list goes on if you are Rodney Adkins.

I’m drinking red wine at Rumors on 12th Ave in Nashville. The wine is good and free and there’s pizza and scallops and asparagus involved. Somehow I got myself invited to join a private party. This is America; sitting on a patio with people I hardly know drinking good red wine.

They tell me that being married is difficult. I wonder if it’s more difficult than being single in a new town. They tell me that relationships are difficult. I can’t disagree with that because I’ve been in a couple and sometimes they were exactly difficult. But I’m telling them that being single is difficult too. Perhaps it’s being single as well as not knowing too many people as well as being in a new environment concurrently that is difficult.

Earlier tonight I sat in church and the preacher was trying to answer the question of why there is so much pain and suffering and difficulty and tragedy in this world. His answer was that he didn’t have an answer. I don’t hold that against him because I can’t answer that either.

Lately everything seems difficult. I meet a lot of people and the one thing I have in common with all of them is that none of us are where we want to be. We’re all striving and straining and digging and reaching for something else. If happiness could be bottled, one of the ingredients would surely be ‘presence’. What I mean is that every now and again I feel happy and it’s usually when I forget about my dreams for a minute or two and enjoy the moment. There’s a lot of good things happening to me and around me and it’s possible sometimes to be present, in the moment, totally ‘there’, instead of wondering how it could be better.

I’m a single guy in a new place and that’s hard. I’m in America; a place I don’t understand yet, and that’s hard. I’m reaching for a dream and that’s hard. But tonight I’m sitting on this porch, laughing at jokes and enjoying this moment.

Maybe this happens in other places. I don't know. But it seems that for me this happens only in America. So if I was a country singer I wouldn't write about lemonade and fireflies. I'd have to write about strangers and scallops and red wine on porches. For me, that's America.