The story of life is hellos and goodbye, wrote Jimi Hendrix, the story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye.

A couple of years ago, I was pre-occupied with rebuilding my life, something Ali and these boys will never know a thing about.

I didn’t know any of the people at lunch today, or who came to my farm this afternoon. I was incapable of empathy, I didn’t really know what it was.

Today, these people – the refugee kids, the Mansion residents –  are woven into my very soul now, central to my life,  quicker than the wink of an eye. They have connected me to my own life, my own destiny. I feel empathy now, I know what it is.

Ali is my brother now, the brother I always wished for, the brother I never had.

We know each other in ways that seem unlikely, if not impossible. I admire Ali and his kids, I think of a quote I read once, it said you endure what is unbearable and you bear it. That is all.

That is the story of these people we call refugees, especially these kids,  they lost everything and come here to lose everything once more, and they bear it, that is all, with grace and love.

“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives behind and our best friends have been killed…and that means the rupture of our daily lives.”  

–Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees.”

Ali knows my love of photography and my need to document this work, so as the van pulled out of the driveway, he stopped and he and the other kids stuck their arms out of the windows to wave goodbye. He knew I would take a photo, he was giving me a gift I would not have asked for.

I was surprised, he didn’t need to do that.

A small act, a thoughtful one, I was standing in the driveway with Fate, she kept jumping into the van to ride to Albany.

Fate and teenage boys were made for one another, they adore her and always ask where she is.

Like Holden Caulfield in Catcher In The Rye, I have never known how to say good-bye in an  honest way. I have never known how to show what I feel when something I care about is leaving me. I am easily overcome with emotion, but I flub goodbye every time.

I want to say something profound, or memorable, and I freeze up, I just sand dumbly waving my hands and think later about what I should have said. I was trying to feel a special kind of good-bye today, I’ve left so many places and people and never even knew I was leaving them.

I remember saying goodbye to my daughter Emma when we left her in her room at Yale and headed home. I just shrugged and waved, and then turned away and cried. She never knew what I was feeling.

I always hated that about myself. It can be a good good-bye or a sad good-bye, but i ought to be able to say it properly and honesty, and fear of emotion is not authentic. Words are my living. It isn’t that I don’t feel things deeply, more that I can’t say things deeply.

I think these people waving at me today as they said goodbye and went down my driveway have changed me forever, and I will not forget them or walk away from them.

I wish I had said that to them, but instead, I stood still and dumb on the slippery driveway, unable to connect my heart to my mouth, waving my hat just like my grandmother waving her handkerchief at me when I drove away, so full of emotion, but with no words to put in my mouth.

it was all in the wink of an eye.

I keep forgetting to add this in many of my posts, but I should say again that your donations make this work with the refugees and Mansion residents possible. If you can or wish, you can donate to this  work by sending a contribution (small ones are just as important as big ones) to my post office box, Jon Katz, P.O. 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected]. If you have a preference just mark the check either “Mansion” or “Refugee” Fund.

All donations are kept in a separate account and monitored by a bookkeeper and accountant. If you are writing to support the blog, you can just say “blog” or “work” Thanks much.