Active Listener: Best Week Ever, pt. 3: Passages.

This is part one of another trilogy. See below.

And now, for the conclusion of my birthday week trilogy, allow me to take you back to the beginning of that awesome week. Unlike Part 1 and Part 2, this installment will involve no feats of athletic endurance, but I hope it will be still be exciting.

As you may recall, I spent the last week of May attending a conference and my college reunion, all while battling food poisoning. I got home May 30th and spent Memorial Day catching up on errands and sleep. On June 1st, I returned to work for a bit of a special event:

I work at the Saint Vincent Pallotti Center, an organization that promotes long-term volunteer service through Catholic programs. One of the ways we promote long-term service is by meeting with people who have recently completed short-term service and helping them process their experiences. If they had a good/meaningful experience doing short-term service, we hope they might consider long-term service.

So, on June 1st, we spent the day working with two groups of college students who had just completed a 2-week service trip in Latin America. Of all the things they saw and did, what seemed to impress them the most was the experience of being unplugged. They had all spent 2 weeks away from cell phones and the internet, and they had been shocked at how much they enjoyed just being with other people for a change. They talked about long conversations, playing cards late into the night, and how people in their host countries seemed to place more value on human connection than we do in the US. We spent a good deal of our processing time discussing how they could bring more of this connection into their lives back home.

After work, I headed to the awesome bookstore Politics and Prose for another special event: a reading by Justin Cronin, author of The Passage. The Passage was a bit of a hit last summer. I bought it as soon as it came out, having read some advanced reviews which described it as great summer reading about the end of the world. I was on a bit of an end-of-the-world kick, having started with The Stand, and proceeded through I Am Legend, The Road, Ender's Game, World War Z, the Hunger Games books, Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, and a few other apocalyptic titles. The Passage did not dissapoint. I plowed through all 750+ pages in a couple of days and then, as I often do with books I love, turned back to page one and read it all again. I've read it a couple more times since. In fact, I learned about the P&P event because I was stalking Cronin's website, trying to find a release date for the forthcoming sequal (alas, 2012).

What do service trips and the end of the world have in common? More than you might think. I recently had a conversation with a friend, speculating about why end-of-the-world books seem to be so popular right now. We had a lot of ideas, and one of them was that they portray a world where all modern communication has been stripped away. In a situation common to many apocalyptic stories, the people in The Passage have no phones or internet, and no idea what might be going on in the rest of the world. Heck, they don't even have mail! Its a situation I can't even imagine anymore, but I think its something many of us long for to some degree, sometimes. Case in point: the kids from the service trip.

Also, during his reading, Cronin told a story that made me think more about human connection. Apparently, he started The Passage as a game with his then 9 year-old daughter. They would go out together, he running and she on her bike, and toss ideas for a story back and forth. He set two rules: it had to be interesting and one of the characters had to have red hair (like his daughter's). I was touched to hear that such a successful and widely-loved book had come out of some quality time between a father and daughter.

(I was also reminded of a game I once played with a little boy I worked with one summer in Philadelphia. I was co-leading a summer day camp, working with 8-10 year-olds. A few weeks in, we got a new camper: a shy and somewhat awkward boy who told me he liked to write stories. For some reason that is still mysterious to me, I responded to this pronouncement by saying "Oh good, because I like stories. Not interesting stories, though. I prefer boring stories. Can you tell me a boring story?" He asked how you tell a boring story, and I explained that you have to tell a story where nothing happens, like "Yesterday, I drove to school and I went neither fast nor slow." Naturally, the more I asked for boring stories, the more the boy told me stories about getting kidnapped, attacked by bears, etc. We both found this game hilarious and played it pretty much every day. Its one of my best memories of that summer.)

The connection theme of the day continued after the reading when I approached Cronin to get a couple of books signed. Writers are like rock stars to me, and I often have trouble acting even semi-normal in front of them. My book signing experiences range from the totally humiliating (Sherman Alexie, in front of whom I could not utter a word) to the utterly amazing (David Sedaris, who was so gracious that I wrote a sermon about our encounter). On balance, though, they tend to be more humiliating.

Fortunately, this one went fairly well. I was getting one book signed for my niece, who happened to be graduating from high school the next day. So, I had an opening line ready: "This is for my niece, who is graduating from high school tomorrow. Feel free to write any words of wisdom you might have." He wrote "Enjoy your life," which I think is sound advice. Then, things almost ran off the rails. He saw my name, looked up, and said "Alicia!" I think I stared blankly for about 20 seconds before the gears of my brain clicked back into place and I recalled that Alicia is one of the main characters in the book. In fact, she is the girl with red hair, and a bit of a badass/warrior type. He looked at my hair and said "Its a little red, maybe," at which point I seized my opportunity to stop seeming like I had never read a book which I had in fact just read for the fourth time. I said "I don't know about the hair, but I like to think I'm a bit of a badass. Maybe that's the connection." This comment was rewarded with the following inscription:

The next day, I presented the signed book to my niece, Summer, who is also a badass and just happens to have red hair. Then, in one of the prouder moments of my life, I got to watch her graduate.