Final Good-Byes

April 4, 2002

This is my last email from Gold Coast

Good-bye ocean; good-bye beach; good-bye mountains; stores, & café lined avenues. Good-bye to the perennial sunshine & ever-blue skies. Although we may have set a record by being here for seven months & never swimming in the ocean on the Gold Coast, we’ll miss it all.

Welcome to Syd & Janet Bruce as well as their children Daniel & Rebekka. Welcome also to three other Gold Coast families who join the list of those who get this email. They bring to seventy-three the number of email addresses to which I send this journal.

We had our weekly dinner at the Thai restaurant last night. All went as it should. We had a rollicking good time & pretended we weren’t leaving. Well, there was that moment when Janet Bruce & I almost lost it while standing in the queue waiting to order. As we hugged & said our farewells, I thought I would be able to walk away without a tear. Then I realized we’d been standing in front of the closed restaurant for a half hour & none of us was willing to be the first to break away. Finally, David made the move, took me by the arm, & announced that we were going to farewell the Pacific Ocean before it got too late. It was as if he thought it might close by the time we got to the beach. There was a last- ditch round of hugs as Janet bravely hung onto the fact that this wasn’t really a final good-bye. We had to drop off the linens at her house tomorrow & would see her again.

When we walked away, the tears came. We were turning our backs on people who knew we were here for the short term, but who embraced us into their family as if we were to become a permanent part of their lives. They fought to the end to make us want to stay & used every trick in the book. They played the weather card: spring snows in March vs. autumn in March with blazing bush loads of flowers. They played the lifestyle card: the hustle bustle of the city vs. laid back Aussie mates on the Gold Coast. And they played the guilt card: how can you leave the congregation without a rabbi now that they’ve had a taste of what it’s like to have one? Even with all their good arguments, the family card won. It trumped their ace.

Toby