So last monday, my family’s exchange student left. And since last monday, the sun hasn’t come out for more then an hour. Maybe this norwegian kid has some sort of karmic effect over the weather, maybe he just picked a good time to leave.
Sunday night we played a soccer game, the weather was beautiful (but a little muggy), and it was a great game. Everyone played well, we scored two goals in the second half to come back from being down one nil, and by the end of the game we were just running circles around the other team. It felt great.
The sunset provided a marvelous backdrop for the second half of the game. The sky was painted in hues of orange, yellow and red. The team had a little party to celebrate his leaving with cookies and pop, and believe me, after nintey minutes of soccer, cookies and pop tastes just great.
We went home, everyone was in a great mood. Had dinner, and nobody would leave the table right after they were finished. But he had to pack.
He probably spent four hours packing. He needed to fit a year (plus what he brought over) into his suitcases, and they couldn’t go over the airline baggage limit. He’d already sent two great big boxes home via airmail. He came out and said that he couldn’t fit half his things in, so my Mom gave him a hand and they managed to get everything but a small box of disks and a few huge dictionaries.
Again, the sun really hasn’t shined since he left. On the way to drop him off we drove out into the suburbs, which always makes me sad, to a church parking lot. In the ditch between the lot and the street there was a stump cutter, a big and yellow bulldozer sized machine with a chainsaw blade on it that rumbled and hissed and made such a racket you could hardly speak. When it wasn’t raining we tried to throw a football around while more and more cars of families saying goodbye to their host kin. About a half hour after we got there the stump cutter whirred down the road and out of earshot.
People who don’t want you to be late somewhere generally tell you to come atrociously early, and my parents were in a somber enough mood to show up right on time. The bus didn’t leave for an hour and a half. There was plenty of time to say goodbye, but just before the bus left the goodbye was said quickly and both parties drove away.
The next day he called, I got the phone. He’d had to take a bus to a secret planned activity monday, then monday night a bus to Chicago, which took eight or nine hours, the bus drivers usually don’t go fast. Chicago to Amsterdam, loaf around the airport until the next morning when his flight conected to Oslo. He sounded groggy, not very happy. He said he was having a good time. But I knew better, my Dad still hasn’t stopped telling the joke about the dying Norwegian’s last words: “I’m fine”.
He hadn’t been able to sleep in the car ever. My family takes a precocious amount of long car trips, and our goal was to teach the kid how to sleep in the 22 hour ride to Montana. We couldn’t. Airplanes fall into the same boat. As a going away present we got him a belkin iPod battery pack, so that with a few extra AA’s he would be able to listen to music all the way home. He was sure going to need it.
Since he left it’s just been wierd around my house. Last night there was a soccer game, and our backs let in two goals that I’m sure he’d have stopped. I wandered into his room to get a book off the shelves, and its just too empty. It feels sort of like my dog died, and I’m five years old – theres a slight notion that sometime I’ll see him again, but he isn’t there, and even though I know where he is, and what happened to him, he’s just gone. For better or worse.
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