Friday, December 4, 2009

I wrote the first of these columns back in February partly because I have a huge ego.

"I lead a pretty interesting life," I though to myself. "I bet people are wondering what I'm doing and thinking about when I'm not sitting at a city council meeting or taking photos at a parade."

As a result, the Tide Waters column, which had been featured in the Free Press sporadically over the past four years, was given a permanent home. It got off to a great start, but it turns out you can only write so many columns about killing rats in a dirty Long Key apartment without boring the general public, and thus the column turned into the dictations from the shallowest part of my brain.

Every tiny piece of success I blew up to grandiose levels, and each problem or setback I came across I inevitably made someone else's fault.

It was a great place to write from because it satisfied the most basic parts of my neurotic needs. Once a week I got to be the coolest kid in the room who never had his stories interrupted. This complimented the whole "living in a small pond" effect nicely, especially for someone who is mentally about as deep as a puddle.

Let's take a break from the inane, probe that puddle a bit and determine why people actually chose to call Marathon home.

The obvious reasons are the weather, island living and fishing/boating. None of those played a part in my decision to work and live in the Keys. For one, I hate the heat. I'd move into the walk-in cooler at Ralph's Deli if the rent was reasonable. The whole island and boating vibe never really resonated with me either, since I grew up on an island, albeit a much larger one with three million people spread across the sprawling suburbs of Long Island.

I came down here partly because, again, I have a huge ego.

"How dare my work go unrecognized in the largest media market in the country," I would say to myself from the office of the weekly newspaper where I used to work as a stupid 22-year-old.

Sure, I lived in an area that was covered by four daily newspapers, a 24 hour news network and a slew of network news stations, but it didn't matter. I needed to feel like I was actually part of something, not just contributing stories for a newspaper holding down a rack at the grocery store.

So I jetted, and landed here in a town of 10,000. It was my first experience living in a small town, and with it came some new behaviors I had to get used to. For example, not being able to angrily honk my car horn at the driver in front of me because that person more than likely knows who I am and where I live took some getting used to.

I also couldn't tell stupid stories to pass away the hours of awkward conversations at bars, because sooner or later the other person would figure out I don't hold the world record for snowglobe juggling.

Even though I was involved in some surprising situations, the only thing that truly surprised me about living in Marathon was the fact that while I lost the ability to blissfully blend into the scenery, I actually made some genuine friends.

As a child you are typically bound in your social interactions to those within a bicycle trip's radius. People tend to keep this group of friends through high school simply because of convenience and habit.

You didn't chose these friends, and they didn't chose you. You simply became accustomed to each other. Some of the best friendships in the world are forged by jumping over those hurdles, but more often than not these friendships say less about who you are and more about how much you are willing to endure.

It typically isn't until you move away from your hometown or go off to college that your personality gets a true test. Will people actually like me? Will I like them? Will they judge the collection of hand-whittled wooden smurfs I keep in my bedroom?

That process was delayed for me since I played lacrosse in college, and again was bound to the same static group of people on my team.

The point was kind of driven home during Thanksgiving last week when I was invited to a couple of parties thrown by people who wouldn't have known me from a hole in the wall four years ago. I always considered myself a stoic kind of guy, and was never really inclined to seek out any kind of social interaction. Dare I say, Marathon may have softened me up a little.

American author James Agee once wrote, "How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. You can never go home again."

Essentially what Agee was saying is that you can never return to your original place of comfort, which for most of us is our hometown. I am about to put that theory to the test. As you are reading this I am heading up I-95 back to Long Island to start a new career in my old hometown.

I'm not exactly sure what is my "home" at this point. Is it where I grew up, or is it here where I made a turning point in life? I'm about to find out.

Messages of goodbye, good riddance and pithy comments can be sent to Rob via e-mail at rob.busweiler@gmail.com. You can also follow his past, present and future writings at tidewaters.wordpress.com.