the thin line between optimism and delusion…

President Bush is in Indonesia today, according to a tv news broadcast I heard through a wall.  So I started thinking about Indonesia, and about how far away it is from Georgia, and how you don’t normally meet people around here from Indonesia or even people who have visited Indonesia.  And then I remembered a story from my childhood.

When I was in the fifth grade there was a kid in my class who we will call R.  I went to a small private elementary school.  Most of my classmates had been in my class since we were 4.  We had very few new kids and very few kids moved away or left.  Well, R had been there a few years – and everyone liked him.  His mom was from south Africa and would sing us African songs on field trips.  This was very exotic for Georgia.  R also had bleach blond hair. 

One day R shows up to school and tells us that he isn’t going to be around much longer because he is moving to Indonesia.  We all laughed.  He might as well have told us he was moving to the moon or to mars.  Like the aliens were coming for him on Friday night to take him to Jupiter.  No one believed him.  He was very adamant that he was telling the truth, and that we would see when he didn’t come back that he really was moving to Indonesia.  We looked up Indonesia on the globe.  We laughed again.  We didn’t believe him.  Our teacher didn’t believe him. 

Finally, R’s parents wrote a letter to the school explaining that they really WERE in fact, moving to Indonesia.  We were shocked.  R  really was leaving.  No one ever really left – and if they did they sure didn’t move around the globe to somewhere no one had ever heard of like Indonesia.  And just like that – R was gone.  A few months after R and his family relocated to Indonesia his nice mother sent a letter to our class telling us how happy they were in Indonesia and how R got to surf all the time but that he missed us.  We felt bad for not believing him – and we felt slightly jealous for his adventure. 

So last night I looked R up on myspace to see if he still exists.  He does.  We are friends once again.  Yay.  That is all the personal knowledge I possess about Indonesia.