Trevor Makes Me Laugh (or Is this how it feels to have grown up kids?)

It's good to have Trevor home. There are lots of reasons for this but my favorite is that he makes me laugh.

I know it's not always easy to come "home" from college. He's a year away from completing his degree and he has a life totally apart from us. This is well and good and as it should be.

There's always a little dance when grown "children" re-enter the circle of home. We all have to learn newly developed rhythms, and allow ourselves to adapt to a morphing tune.

I think of Trevor as a man, though I guess I don't see it that way 100% of the time. Circumstantial, I suppose, is the way I actually experience it. A couple of weeks ago we sent him off in the old Land Rover into the wild places to set up camp for volunteers who would arrive with Byron the next day. Man work. Then, the other night, he made himself sick with a funny little home-made corn cob pipe and some awful, cheap pipe tobacco right after a meal of rich curries. Dizzy and barfing from silly things=boyish behavior that makes me feel a little sorry for him while also laughing at him for being a dork. Still, I tucked him in that night and cleaned up the bathroom. Boy child.

The next day he rode his motorcycle alone for 100 miles across rough terrain where there was no phone contact. I knew he would then get up in the middle of the night and hike up a live volcano with a group of friends. I knew there would be no phone contact for at least 48 hours. Heading out into the adventure of it, an experienced man with lots of common sense and skill; me confident he could do it, though I fretted a little since that's my mommy right.

A couple of days later Byron broke down away out yonder in the bush. He didn't have phone contact either but he sent a runner to where connection could be made and we got a call saying he needed Trevor to go out and help him. Trevor, who was preparing for his gig that evening at a local restaurant, moved quickly. He got himself replaced, threw a couple of sleeping bags and some bottles of water in the car and was gone. A man, that was, who can be counted on.

Home the next afternoon, he was tired from a lot of driving and hard work. He had forgotten to drink the water he carried and his stomach was grumbling the after affects of roadside food stops. Still, he left on his motorcycle for the home of friends and dehydrated himself further in the sauna. The smoke burned his eyes and his stomach was increasingly complaining about life. That boy person seemed to be the one that convinced him to go out exhausted and sick, yet he did have the common sense to stay put and not get back on the bike late at night. We'll call that nusu nusu, or half 'n half.

It's his telling of these tales that makes me laugh so hard. He gives the blow by blow descriptions with a mischievous grin.

Mostly-man-with-traces-of-boy, I'll take him home with us any time. And I know his little sister agrees. When the movie got to a scary spot the other night, Heather and (best friend) Sianna both jumped a mile each and landed on either side of Trev. They stayed there, heads on his chest, for the rest of the film.

"These are the days they say we'll remember..."

Yes, I believe they are.