Strange

Posting after a long time ;) Here goes:

People Are Strange 

Songwriters: Jim Morrison / John Paul Densmore / Robert A Krieger / Raymond D Manzarek

People Are Strange lyrics © Doors Music Co., Doors Music Company

People are strange

When you're a stranger

Faces look ugly

When you're alone

Women seem wicked

When you're unwanted

Streets are uneven

When you're down

When you're strange

Faces come out of the rain

When you're strange

No one remembers your name

When you're strange

When you're strange

When you're strange

 

This morning I re-read a journal entry I’d made a few years ago, where I answered the question “What’s one of the strangest things that’s ever happened to you?” I won’t repeat my answer here, good though it was [smile]. Instead I want to reflect on the word “strange” and its meanings.

I looked at two meanings: one, “unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand.” And the second, “not previously visited, seen, or encountered; unfamiliar or alien.” 

In both of those meanings, there is an uncomfortable element, something that is “strange” could potentially be harmful. I remember the term “stranger danger” as a child—don’t talk to strangers, don’t go off with strangers. And yet, if we move out of the community that we know, as we grow and go off to college and careers, meet people in social situations, many, many people will start off as strangers. And, in terms of new experiences, new things might seem strange at first. So that, when we look at the second definition, there’s a benign meaning to strange—that we will have a new experience and it might turn out to be good. Or meet a new person and we might end up with a friend. Still I think we should drop that word, “alien” from that second definition because it’s a word that’s become so sinister in the past few years. Instead perhaps we could just rest with the word “new” or, in relation to a person, a “newcomer.”

I have been a newcomer so many times in my life. I left the community I grew up in—mainly newly middle class, Roman Catholic, very Irish/Scottish—in my late teens and entered so many different cultures in the decades that have passed. And each time I moved, or switched jobs, I encountered that “stranger” feeling. In my happiest encounters, I was welcomed as a “newcomer” rather than a “stranger.” It was inexpressibly comforting to work with, go out with, a group of Brits in England and, while there was a good natured kind of ribbing about my being a “colonial”, there was also a kindness, a welcome. 

When I returned to Canada as a single parent, I lucked into settling in a university suburb in southern Ontario. I can’t say it was done consciously but, in terms of “stranger acceptance”, being in a university city and working at a university city are perfect. There are very few strangers in universities: there are so many people from all over with different interests and experiences. “Strangers” are as accepted as “strange” ideas or “strange” family arrangements. 

I hadn’t wanted to appear as “strangers” for my daughter’s sake. Children can pick up on this so easily and, as I wrote above, feeling like a stranger, encountering “strangers” can be an uncomfortable feeling for a child. For a child with a single mom, no father in sight, relatives spread out in different cities, moving to an insular community of two-parent multigenerational families would have made us stick out like a sore thumb. Instead, we were welcomed into a vibrant, shifting community where no one was treated as a “stranger.” Where people from different countries, people who’d had different life experiences, all somehow melted together, still retaining their uniqueness, their individuality, but coming together, strangers no more.

Strangeness is something we all encounter as we grow up. Watch a child’s face the first time they taste a lemon. Or an adult, the first time they practice yoga. The first time you walk into a medieval cathedral and see all of the martyrs.... It doesn’t have to be a “bad” or “dangerous” thing, being strange. As long as we have someone there to be “strange” with.