A Trip Through the Wardrobe

It's always struck me how easily "alternate realities" that we experience outside of our normalacy get so easily shuffled into a memory, like waking from a dream, when we emerge back into our daily life. When I was younger I felt a little of this when I would return from a vacation that took me far away. On Monday morning things would always just go back the same as they every were, as though those fun places were just a movie you had watched on Sunday afternoon.

But even that didn't fully prepare me for my first touch of what I call a "Wardrobe Experience". When you go on vacation, the feeling of getting lost in that other place is still a little bit there when you return. The house you come home to is so quiet, frozen in time while you were away. Nothing has been moved. As if it was waiting to be revived, to have life breathed into it again, when it's people returned. That much at least reminds you that what you had done was real---that and the exhaustion you would be recovering from for a week.

But I'm talking about something more intense. I borrowed the name from Mr. Lewis' book, "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe". If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. The world will come to know this tale in a much more ever-present sense this Christmas as it's being brought out as a motion picture using the some of the same people that brought the Lord of the Rings to life.

The story goes that four children are playing hide and seek in a strange, large old house that they are being put up in. This particular time, as they hide toward the back of an old wardrobe, they find that there seems to be no back wall. They keep walking until they emerge from a forest in a magical world, where they embark on great adventures. They live an entire life as kings and queens of this new magical kingdom. Years pass and they grow older seeming to have almost totally forgotten their former lives back in England.

But then one day, on a hunt, they travel back into the forest that they had emerged from so long ago. They are so caught up in the pursuit as they travel through this forest that they don't feel themselves being drawn back. In the end they find themselves emerging from the wardrobe again, as children, back into the spare room at the very moment they began playing that rainy day that felt so long ago. But not even a minute had passed in this world the whole time they were in the other. It is this emerging back into the unchanged world that seemed a proper metaphor for feelings I first felt so profoundly as a foreign exchange student in 1986.

I was living a dream I'd carried with me for most of my life to that point---I was living in Australia. Specifically, I was living in Brisbane, Queensland, a large city of about a million and a half people at that time. In the middle of the year, the organization I was there with, AFS, moved the students for two weeks to a environment different to their main assignment. So city kids would move to the country and country kids would come to the city, all this done in an effort to keep the foreign exchange experience as broad as possible.

When I originally went to Australia I was taken out of the only life I'd ever known and placed into a new strange land. I was only beginning to find my footing when, like a dream within a dream, I was again struggling for equilibrium in a hospitable imbalance created by this city/country exchange. I was placed into a home in a small country town that was inviting but unknown. A place where I was an outsider. But as the two weeks passed and I hung out with the young people at the local high school, I found myself fitting in and starting to make connections and put down shallow roots a little, out of a need to belong. But just as abruptly as I had arrived, my time there was done and I was taken back to my 'home'.

When I came back and walked through the sliding glass doors back into the kitchen of my host family, everyone was running back and forth with the needs of the day and I was sucked back into the hole I had left. Even though the world went on without me, I completed the picture again like a missing puzzle piece now that I was back. I found myself swept along with the current, but no one there could really realize that I wasn't the same. I was a new 'me' because of what I had experienced, different from the 'me' that had been there two weeks ago. I didn't look different or act particularly different, but there was a part of me that had changed inside in a way that I could never fully share with them. Consequently, there was a small separation that occurred there, the shakey ground falling away leaving a thin chasm which isolated me a bit from the people that I felt like I should be attached to so seamlessly.

That gap is where the Wardrobe Moment exists. For that brief period the thing that made my life richer also made me feel just a little more alone.

You can imagine how much more profound this feeling was when I returned to my hometown after being gone for a year to another country. I returned to my old room, my old friends, the old neighborhood streets. Everything was the same--except me. It was like a feeling of homesickness in reverse, longing for a 'me' that once was but was now a memory. Even though I was constantly around people, people who supported me and loved me and would do anything for me, I couldn't escape the feeling of being set apart and removed from them, even in their presence. The frustration and strangeness of this feeling and living this paradox was almost overwhelming. But I got through it. That's the only thing that can be done. Establish a new reality until the feeling fades and you're home again.

Ever since then I have gone through larger and smaller wardrobe moments. I think after a certain point, life just becomes a series of them.

This Sunday afternoon returning from camp with my son was a micro moment like that. I stood in my living room watching a bunch of the neighborhood kids watching our latest DVD, "A Series of Unfortunate Events". While the movie was playing, our kids snuck into the kitchen at my wife's prompting to make May baskets. We never seem to remember May Day until we receive the first basket on our porch from one of the more holiday conscious relations.

So while the neighborhood friends were sitting in our living room watching the movie, our kids were sneaking out the back door to put colorful bags of popcorn, M&Ms and Twizzlers on their friend's porches. I stood back and watched, thinking that this is the way things should be, but that they were so far removed from the weekend camping adventure.

It was a little different this time, though, because I had traveled with a companion. Being toghether while separated from everything else by an experience meant that we had something that just the two of us shared. Suddenly, what had once created a feeling in me that I would have given anything to bridge, gave me something that I could hide away and treasure with my boy.

It was then that I looked back into the kitchen to see my wife surrounded by the candy chaos of this holiday's creating. She was assessing the current stock to be sure we had enough to get us through the remaining bags. As I looked at her I thought, as I often have, that the two of us have traveled a road together for such a long time and over so many miles that there is no one in the world I share a connection with so completely. She is and has always been my ultimate Wardrobe companion.