Double Agent

Bahati loaned me her copy of Casino Royale at rehearsal the other day. I haven't watched it yet.

On a plane, off on an adventure, the airline magazine has a large photo of Don Adams as Maxwell Smart on the cover, shoe phone clamped to his ear.

Secret Agents. Super Spies.

Sometimes I feel like Bond. Not the Bond of the novels, thuggish and misogynistic, but the Bond of the films. In control, smooth, and blessed by luck. I have just the right words, my timing is flawless, and every setback proves to be a launching point to move me forward. Everything clicks.

More often, however, I feel like Maxwell Smart, or Inspector Clouseau. Bumbling, fumbling, walking into walls, making a general ass out of myself. Sure, Smart and Clouseau bumble into saving the day, but that's the way it is with comedy and fiction. But in the real world, bumbling is bumbling and rarely do you step into a two foot hole at a full run without breaking your leg in the process.

The scary thing, though, the truly frightening thing, is when everything feels like Bond, but when all is done and you take stock of where you are, and you realize that it's *your* home base that you blew up, *your* colleague mistaken for an opposing agent that you shot, *your* little world reduced to ashes.

Every Clouseau thinks he is MacGyver. Every Smart thinks he's Bond. Every Charlie Brown steps up to the pitcher's mound, ready to be the hero but knowing in his heart that he's more likely to be the goat.

But I'm mixing my pop-culture metaphors. Let's move back from the round headed kid in the jagged stripe shirt.

I've been flipped inside out, back to front all weekend. Visiting someone I have known for years, and yet know very little about. Rediscovering a city I once called home, but that oftentimes asserted itself as a sequence of powerful memories so insistent that they pulled me out of the present. Encountering people I did not know, who greeted me as warmly as my own tribe, while I stood awkwardly aware of my outsider status. I have been amused, amazed, inspired, illuminated, revealed, intrigued, ashamed, astounded, aloof, intoxicated, aroused, apprehensive, nostalgic, gastronomically pampered, and existentially befuddled.

Within the space of 48 hours, I have been all over my emotional map. I haven't been driving a supercharged BMW that can fly, swim, shoot rockets, and convert itself into an irresistible boudoir. I've been bumbling, stumbling my way around, colliding, ricocheting, and tumbling from point to point... and horribly aware of it most of the time.

I am Maxwell Smart with self-awareness.

I can't even pretend to be Bond.