The Scottish Exodus

Exodus: New Endings and Beginnings

Andrea and I at [Brian P.] Hudson's wedding, August 1999.

Troy, Michigan
16 September 2000

My name is Andrew Darrell Devenney, and this exercise in composition is intended to be the first installment in a travelogue of my year studying abroad in Scotland. Supposedly, you need to know who I am, what I’m doing there, why I am going, you know, the silly little personal details spewed on the WEB in place of physical human interaction. My wife’s name is Andrea, and my favorite cereal is Cinnamon Toast Crunch. . .blah, blah, blah.

Other matters, however, occupy me. I sit here now, in the suburban panorama of "The City of Tomorrow. . .Today," wondering how the future will play out. Nothing is ever as it seems in the phantom moment.

Glasgow looms on the horizon, large, vague, someplace tomorrow, with funny money and funny accents. Central Michigan University lingers in the past, comfortable, unremarkable, complete, like a rite of passage conquered and discarded. Troy is nothing, a forgettable station on the London Underground, Baker Street perhaps. My life is in flux, in the phantom moment.

I must, in the interests of integrity, disclose something. The idea of the phantom moment is not an original thought, more of a derivation. Warren Ellis, a comic book writer of masterful skill and merit, once wrote back in January that the year 2000 was the phantom year, mainly because nobody could agree upon when the millennium really began (2000 vs. 2001). Therefore, the year 2000 was a year of flux, a phantom year when strange and wonderful moments could happen. The idea has stuck in my head and seems an apropos observation on the state of my life right now. The year 2000 has indeed been a strange and disturbing year. A marriage, a Masters Thesis, long lost relatives appearing from the ether, sickness and death, the year has been different indeed.

Everything is rather fuzzy around the edges, almost surreal. I see my friends and family for the last time with the same dispassionate air that I would have when purchasing a paper at a newsstand. They’re there, and then they're gone, but I don’t feel as if they’re gone. I’ll see them next week, I say, not next year. There’s Hudson, frantically reaching into the backseat of my wife’s Saturn for his briefcase before I drive away, lost in my own thoughts. I’ll see him next week; we have to buy our comics together on Wednesday, the way we have for the last three or four years. There’s Dr. O’Neil, rubbing out a cigarette butt with his foot in his outdoor office as he leaves to get ready for Michigan History. I’ll see him next week; we have to go over a draft of my thesis. There’s my mom, standing drenched in the rain taking my picture with a disposable Kodak MAX camera. I’ll see her next week; I have to yell at her for living on the Internet while I’m expecting phone calls.

Nothing contributes to this profound sense of unreality more than my wife’s grandfather, or more appropriately, his slow, debilitating death at St. John Hospital in Detroit.

I am not, nor have I ever been, much of a spiritually based person. I tend toward the empirical, the dispassionate, the von Rankian, if you will. Nor is the art of poetry my muse; I have not the tongue for it. My poetic attempts are of the crude, rhyming couplets variety, iambic pentameter, Mother Goose, and the man from Nantucket in tow. Poetry I leave to Andrea and her emotive word-smithy, for making people cry at my words is unsettling.

Yet there is something about watching a man slowly die that moves one to think beyond the confines of empiric reality and tactile sensation. And I’m not talking about God, Jesus, Buddha, or other drek like that. Different words come to mind, symbiosis, juxtaposition, or transference. At this point, Andrea would begin to babble on about karma and chakras, but it’s subtler than that. It’s almost ironic in a way, his death and our life together, ending and beginning at one and the same point. One of Andrea’s happiest moments this year was dancing with her grandfather at our wedding reception, and I’m sure it was just as happy for him as well. The symbolism is rich. Ed Tazzia has lived a vibrant, full life, surviving the Depression, the Second World War and a German concentration camp, and a bevy of hot-blooded Italian and Syrian women. He leaves behind a rich in life, diverse, and somewhat neurotic Middle American family, which is all one can ask for really. His end is our beginning.

Glasgow is, therefore, our exodus. Andrea and I travel far and away to find new adventures, find a new life together, and find Scottish ale. We don’t know where we will live or what we will do to fill our time, but whatever it is, I’ll record it here for all to see, our forty years in the wilderness.

---drew, in the phantom moment. . .

Copyright ©Andrew D. Devenney, 2009, all rights reserved.