Does anybody remember the movie “Sliding Doors?” As Gwyneth Paltrow - with a British accent - is running to catch the train, her life splits into separate realities. In one, she makes it before the doors slide shut - in another, she’s left panting on the platform - domino events that roll out two wildly divergent futures.

Our Malaysia trip this year made me think of that 10-year-old movie.  You can only be in one place at one time, but in all the places you’ve lived, and all the people you’ve touched, and been touched by, parallel worlds roll on without you.

Each time we go to see my family, we get lost in the city where I grew up. Skyscrapers block once lush views of rainforested hills, new highways weave through the city in crazy configurations. On the site of my old school, where a white colonial building once stood fronted by palm trees, is a shopping mall the size of a supertanker filled with Gucci and Louis Vuitton. 

And in the past year, big, jarring, shocking things have happened in our social circle while we’ve been gone. Two marriages disintegrated. A family lost their only child. A favorite cousin was diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer. All while we’ve been so far away.

Not that anything would have been different for them if we were there. But at least we’d be there.

My parents, at 68 and 66, are healthy, active and still working. My father’s cell phone rings all day with invitations to golf. My mother’s beeps even more often, and she can out-text most Minnesota teenagers. But each time we see them, there’s a little more gray hair, a few more wrinkles. They waited this long for grandchildren only to have the two little girls live on the other side of the world. The house is quieter than ever now that my brother, at the grand old age of 30, moved out to his own place, a high-rise apartment downtown that wouldn’t look out of place in Manhattan.

Yes, Cribsheeters, this is my annual homesick post disguised as one on existential angst.

Zoe, wise beyond her four years, summed it up best. As we backed out of my parents’ driveway, my father at the wheel, heading to the airport to catch our plane back to Minnesota, Zoe looked back at my waving mother.

“Why is Por Por staying behind?” she asked, “when there’s nobody staying there with her?”

That made me cry.

  Between Two Worlds: Zoe, Maya and their Daddy, on transit at LAX.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 8:33 am and is filed under Family Life, Holidays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.