What We Miss

So the meaning of "you" was all of us and we are looking at seven more days in the United States until we, all five of us, once again assume the expat label.

A kindly woman who will remain nameless recently asked me, "What will you miss the most when you are there? Will you miss your freedoms you have here? You will have to cover your head, won't you?" She then rambled along, in a concern-tinged voice, about burqas (the head to toe covering required if women in Saudi Arabia) and camels and hedonistic, porkless lands far far away.

What will we miss?

Well right away we will miss a couple of days of school. Tian schools like a dream, interested in and diligent about everything, reading from extra resources,and using her artistic talents to create a detailed picture timeline of monks and kings long ago dead.

Silas schools like a sloth entrapped in thick, slimy mud. He barely moves during the school day. Instead he cries and whines, he slides from his chair onto the carpeting underneath the table, where he curls into a ball. If he had the vocabulary, he would probably swear a red streak. So some of us will miss school for those two days and some of us will be doing a happy dance.

We will miss Tony's birthday in the flurry of airplanes and connections and settling into a new country and a new routine.

We will miss our cats, Dory and Oscar, and Tian has already had a tearful evening when all she wanted was to bury her face in Oscar's thick black fur. "When I am sad and no one will listen to me Oscar always lets me snuGGGLLLLEEE! (WAH!!!!!!)" My suggestion, that she bury her face in the fur of my parents' archaic Siamese cat, Sydney, was met with another sob. "I would but Sydney smells bad! And last time I buried my face in her fur she licked my finger and when I sniffed it it smelled like POOOOOP!!!! (WAH!!!! GIGGLE!!!!!)"

And of course we will miss our families, too. That is a given. But what will we miss besides the obvious?

This morning Tony and I went for a walk. The morning air was cool and crisp and the sky was that unbelievable blue it turns only in the autumn. We saw the flags flying half mast for 9/11 and talked about what we had missed last time we were out of the country. We missed the shock and grieving of 9/11 while we were in South Korea.

We pulled together our memories of that night (if was night for us on that side of the world). Our telephone rang after we had gone to bed; on the other end we heard broken English, punctuated with, "I am sorry...I am sorry...your TV...I am sorry. A building...an airplane...hello." We turned the set on just in time to see the North Tower collapse; we were thoroughly confused by what we were seeing until we managed to find a CNN broadcast.

For a couple of days after 9/11, we caught glimpses of the towers collapsing as Korean Broadcasting replayed the footage. We had people approach us and say, "I am so sorry about your country." But it was over for us within the week. We heard nothing more from the Korean media, which allowed our sadness and concern to heal naturally and relatively quickly.

So as we passed the post office today and saw that American flag, its tip nearly drooping to the ground, we realized that what we will miss in Oman is the daily ebb and flow of life here in the United States. As we return at the end of our contract, we will be missing months and years of events that have occured on this side of the Atlantic while we have been away.

Okay, but when you come right down to it, most of all we will miss the cats. But only the ones that don't smell like poop.