Commonplace: A Reflection on Uncles
When I was young, I grew up visiting my 2 uncles named Edgardo and Fernando. They lived on the east side of Buenos Aires, while we lived closer to the northern point of the city. Edgardo and Fernando are identical twins who had grown up practically attached to each other. They were so identical in fact, they used to trick their friends and family by switching lives and no one ever noticed, not even their teachers. Once they reached the ages of 26, Edgardo began to get sick. Oof, the big C. Cancer. Luckily, these brothers were so matched genetically that they contained identical bone marrow—except Fernando lacked the cancer gene. It was quite literally a miracle that Edgardo survived the cancer that he had. Thanks to this, I got to meet him.
When our family would go and see them, my sister and I always thought it was funny that our mom told us that they were supposed to look exactly the same. The part that we did not understand is that Edgardo looked very different from his brother now that he had undergone such serious chemotherapy; they would never look the same again. My mom kept telling us that when we were older, we could see how alike they were, just to be patient. Ridiculous, right? How would all of us aging at the same time help me see that one of them is bald and one of them isn’t. One of them has wrinkles and the other doesn’t. One smiles and laughs incredibly loudly, the other can’t.
Receiving the email with our Wineskin theme for the semester was exciting, imagining all of the possible things this one word could inspire our community to create. It is an uplifting thought if you let it venture on its own a bit. However, once I started to think about what “Commonplace” meant in all of its contexts, I started to think about my uncles. They are twins (less than common, I am sure) who grew up completely inseparable for 23 years. Yet, none of us kids could be convinced they were at once so similar. A whole new generation of family members who had to grow up to see how similar these two peas in a pod really were. Because, as it turns out, my mom was right. The older we grew, the more we saw how their hair was the same color, one of them just had less. As Fernando aged, his wrinkles lined up right with Edgardo’s. Their laughs did sound the same right at the end, one just overpowered the other. The internal connection that the two of them had was commonplace—to them and to the rest of the world. We just hadn’t seen it yet.
The determiners of what is considered “common” are both what we think they will be, and what we could not have imagined. As a society we all contribute to what is within our own commonplaces—but what if we contradict each other? We have different evidence to contribute; does this makes one “more true” than the other? This strange and contradicting intersection is, I believe, where we can find the most peace. As many of us know the verse Proverbs 3:5, “Trust the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” There may be a lot of common things in the little worlds we live in that are both true and contradicting. Perhaps it should be common to accept that we don’t know everything, so try to look for the peace amidst the confusion.
-Belen Yager
