The Shortcut Looks Like the Way Home

College girl. Blonde in a bright green shirt holding a clipboard, asking names and questions. Welcoming committee.

What’s your major?

Chemical engineering.

Oh, you’re one of the smart ones.

The van pulls forward through the maze of cones and kids wearing shirts that say “Unpack Your Future” that stand ready with laundry carts to take your life’s treasure into the unknown.

Who will you meet on your journey?

Through the great halls of stone and brick. Unknown sounds and the faces and voices of those someday familiar.

Will you take the long road home? Or the shortcut? The shortcut looks like the way home.

Your first meal at the feast.

Your first night in a strange room.

Act I. Argos

Christmas Eve. The long night and the wind howling pelting snow sideways against the windows and the drifts that bury the paths and block the roads. Dreams of tunnels and forts and marshmallows dripping with chocolate.

Bedtime in the far north.

Two bathed now in pajamas and blankets, snuggled in with the old gray dog.

Time for a story. The older is at the edge of story time and some nights he wants to listen and some nights not and days move on.

Tonight, a new tale.

Not an Odyssey. A tale of an Odyssey told from home. Those who remain behind.

The reader starts with the title. “Argos. The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog” by Ralph Hardy.

Book One. Chapter One. “On the Stupidity of Sheep.”

The two giggle.

The sheep refuse to find shelter from the storm. Their wool smells. Argos, the great hunting dog born of bear and wolf, their protector. Wet.

Chapter One ends: “Some men did return to their homes from Troy to tell the tale. But my master and his men have not. The mountain eagles circle higher and higher, riding the rippling currents, looking for him as I have asked, but see him not. The seagulls I have ordered to fly over every ship to see if my master is enslaved report nothing. Even the vultures, which smell death everywhere, are silent. And so I believe he lives.”

February.

Smoke in the kitchen. The microwave door hangs open and the smell of burnt oatmeal goes all the way up the stairs. The boy stands back from it with the look of a man watching his first ship sink. Windows open. Ten below outside. The whole house breathing cold air until the smell surrenders.

What’s done is done. The house stands.

Later we laugh and carry the old microwave out into the snow drift and the smell inside it will never go away.

That night, bedtime. Pajamas and blankets and the old gray dog.

Book One. Chapter Sixteen. “Tales of Hades:” “I pray that…you set me on a pyre there and burn me with my armor….Do this for me, or I am cursed for eternity.”

Honor by fire.

Some nights he listens from the doorway. Tonight, he is under the blanket.

March came and with it great snowstorms. First we dug tunnels tall enough for a boy to stand in. The roofs sagged and the mound slowly shrank.

The book was nearly done now.

Bedtime. The reader went up the stairs the way they had all winter.

The two bathed and in pajamas under the blanket. The reader had to coax one out to listen, the book was nearly done. The old gray dog circled twice and lay down with his head on a leg.

The last chapters. Odysseus returns at last, a stranger in his own home; only one creature in all of Ithaca knows him. Argos.

Act II. Lessons

Troy. The Trojan War. The legend Homer told took place around twelve hundred years before Christ. He told the tale around five centuries later.

Homer begins near the end.

For ten years, Greek warriors laid siege to a city that would not bend to their will. Troy’s location wasn’t an accident. It sat at a decisive point to control key geography. The straits didn’t cause the Trojan War, but they are why the city mattered.

Then the trickery of the horse. Warriors inside the gates. The city slept.

In the dark, the warriors climbed out and opened the gates for the army waiting outside. Houses burned through the night. Men who had names the day before, dead in the streets. They took women and children.

Odysseus wasn’t watching Troy burn from a ship. He was inside the horse and inside the walls when the city fell. By dawn, the Greeks had destroyed the city.

So. The war is over. There was a way home, and some of the other kings took it. He could go directly home, but there were other matters. Men he was tied to, arguments to settle, other things pulling at him, other routes to consider.

Odysseus has a choice.

The first: Go to class. Do the work. Come home when you said you would. Save some money. Keep the promise. Stay married. Train when you don’t feel like training. One foot in front of the other, the next step and then the next.

None of those things feel heroic while you’re doing them.

Or the other: the road that looks shorter.

And so begins the Odyssey.

Their first stop, a city called Ismarus. It had nothing to do with Troy, but they attacked it anyway.

After the assault, Odysseus told the men it was time to go. For ten years there had been a time for war. Troy had fallen. That time was over. But there was food and wine and things to steal and divide, and they stayed too long. By morning, more men had come down from the country and they had to defend themselves.

They fought all day, and by the time the Greeks got back to sea, six men from every ship were dead.

There is a season, a time and place for everything.

A time when your parents woke you up, reminded you where to be, knew where you were at night, and caught some of your mistakes before they became expensive. That season ends.

Then an island where three of the men ate the lotus and forgot why they were trying to get home. Not who they were, really. They didn’t forget everything. Just the part where, somewhere across the water, there was another life they were supposed to want and get back to.

They forgot.

They didn’t want to leave.

Odysseus had to drag them back to the ships crying and tie them down.

Remember why you came.

One of the great treasures in life is to find work you love. Don’t trade that away because something is easier or safer or more pleasant that makes you forget what you wanted in the first place.

When you are young, you want to burn the world to the ground. Remember.

Then the cave. The men find cheese and sheep and food, and they want to take some and get out. Odysseus wants to stay and meet whoever lives there, and that turns out to be a bad decision he could not have forecast at the time.

The Cyclops comes home, rolls a stone across the entrance, and eats two of the men. Later he eats more. Odysseus gets him drunk, tells him his name is Nobody, blinds him, and the surviving men escape when the Cyclops lets the sheep out.

It works. They’re back on the ship. They’re leaving.

But Odysseus can’t stand that the Cyclops doesn’t know who beat him. So Odysseus shouts his real name and where he’s from.

Turns out the Cyclops is Poseidon’s son.

You don’t need to tell people how smart you are, how talented you are, how hard you work, how much potential you have.

Don’t announce yourself. There’s plenty of time for people to know how great you are without you telling them. People will discover that on their own.

Then the King of the Winds. He gives Odysseus a bag with every wind trapped inside except the one blowing toward Ithaca, so only the wind that will carry them home is free.

For nine days they sail. Odysseus stays awake at the helm until he can’t take it anymore and falls asleep. When he does, they are close enough to Ithaca to see the fires of their home burning on shore.

But the crew has been watching him guard the bag, and out of envy they decide it must contain treasure he hasn’t shared with them. They open it.

All the winds come out at once.

Odysseus wakes up and watches his home disappear over the horizon because the men he trusted thought he was hiding gold from them.

They end up back where they started.

You will meet people who have more than you. More money. Better grades. Better connections. There is always someone at the dance that is prettier than you. Maybe they earned it. Maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t matter.

Envy will make you destroy your own voyage trying to open somebody else’s bag.

Then the giants.

Eleven ships go into the harbor. The giants rain rocks down from the cliffs. None come out. The one ship that stayed out of the harbor cuts its line and gets away.

Time and chance happen to us all.

You will make good choices and still have terrible things happen to you. Keep going.

Next, Circe, daughter of the sun god. When Odysseus’s men reach her island, she welcomes them into her house, gives them food and wine, drugs them, strikes them with her wand, and turns them into pigs.

Odysseus forces her to turn them back.

And in a weird twist, they stay on the island for another year.

They fight no battles. There’s no rowing, no storms, plenty of food to eat and warm beds.

Eventually, the crew has to convince Odysseus that they should probably go home.

There will be times when you need to stop, recover, change your major, take an easier semester, sleep, heal, enjoy yourself. None of those are failure. But eventually, you should probably get going.

Then he goes to the land of the dead because Circe tells him that the way home now requires directions from people who are no longer alive. His mother is there, and she wasn’t dead when he left.

He asks her what happened and learns that she died while he was gone, grieving for him. He tries to put his arms around her. There’s nothing to hold. He tries again and again.

Twenty years is a long time.

There are people waiting for you—their lives keep going while you have your adventure. Things happen to them, too.

Next up, the Sirens.

Odysseus has heard rumor from Circe of what their song does to men, but of course he still wants to hear it. So he comes up with a solution. He has his men put wax in their ears so they can’t hear the song, and then he has them tie him to the mast so he can. Crazypants.

He tells them beforehand that no matter what he says, they are not to untie him.

When he hears the song, he immediately wants loose. He begs, pleads, orders them, fights the ropes. They keep rowing and tie him tighter.

Sometimes you know or suspect that you’re not going to make a good decision. Don’t put it off. Decide while you’re thinking clearly what you’re going to do when the circumstances make thinking clearly difficult.

And, maybe Odysseus shouldn’t have listened to the song at all.

You don’t have to figure out how close you can get to failure without being ruined. Maybe just put wax in your ears and keep rowing.

Then a monster on one side of a passage and a whirlpool on the other. The whirlpool will destroy the ship and kill everyone on it. The monster will take six men.

Odysseus knows this before they enter the strait, but he can’t tell the crew.

He chooses the passage where six men will die.

Some of you will do inherently dangerous things. All of you will face tough choices.

Another island, where there are cattle belonging to the sun god. The instructions are simple: don’t eat the cattle.

Odysseus tells the crew and makes them promise, and they promise they will not eat the cattle.

But then storms keep the ship on the island. The food runs out. Odysseus goes off by himself to pray, and he falls asleep.

The men have a choice: they can die from starvation, or they can risk the wrath of the sun god.

They kill the cattle.

When they finally leave the island, Zeus destroys the ship, and every one of the crew dies except Odysseus.

Eat your bread with joy, drink your wine with a merry heart, and enjoy the hard work of being alive while you can.

All the men who left Ithaca with Odysseus are gone. He survives, holding onto wreckage.

And the lesson here, which isn’t really part of the story, is that everybody who takes the shortcut thinks they’re going to be the one who survives it.

Maybe only one of you will make it.

Then Calypso and the seven-year wait.

She is more than a beautiful woman on an island paradise. Immortality, eternal youth, love, food, sex. Anything he wants. Except for the one thing. He sits by the sea, crying for home.

The gods tell her to release him and he builds a raft and goes back onto the water and Poseidon destroys it.

One day you might get an offer that seems like paradise, at least from the outside looking in. Judge well—there is no perfect offer, always a tradeoff, hidden or known. More money or stress or health risk or time away from family that will start their own Odyssey before you expect it.

Is it worth it? Maybe yes and maybe no. Only you can decide. Do it with your eyes open.

Twenty years after leaving Ithaca, Odysseus drifts ashore there asleep. And home isn’t the place he left.

Men fill his house, eat his animals, drink his wine, and court his wife because they think he is dead. His son has grown up without him. His father is old. His mother is gone.

Odysseus has spent the whole story trying to get home and when he finally gets there he goes in as a beggar.

Nobody recognizes him.

Well, almost.

Except for Argos.

When you go on your Odyssey, you can’t go home to the place you left, because neither you nor home waits in place.

Act III. For Those of You Leaving Home in this Season

As you go out into the world,

The Lord bless you and keep you;Make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;Turn his face toward you and give you peace.

To those left behind, we remember Argos and the blizzard.

Sources

Ralph Hardy, Argos: The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog, Harper Collins, 2016: Google Books, Argos

Troy, archaeological site at Hisarlık, location near the Dardanelles, and traditional Late Bronze Age setting of the Trojan War: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Archaeological Site of Troy

Homer, approximately eighth century B.C.; Homeric epics recorded in roughly their present form around 750 B.C.; Iliad covers only a small portion of the ten-year siege; Trojan Horse and Sack of Troy preserved in the wider Trojan epic tradition: Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Lore About the Trojan War”

Homer, Odyssey, Book 3. Division of the Greek leaders after Troy and the choices surrounding their return home: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 3

Odysseus and the Greek warriors inside the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 11

Ismarus and the Cicones; the Lotus-Eaters; Polyphemus, “Nobody,” Odysseus revealing his name, and Poseidon: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 9

Aeolus and the bag of winds; the Laestrygonians; Circe and the transformation of the men into pigs; the year spent on Circe’s island: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 10

Odysseus in the land of the dead; Tiresias; Anticleia, Odysseus’s mother; and the dead who cannot be embraced: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 11

The Sirens; Scylla and Charybdis; the cattle of Helios; destruction of Odysseus’s final ship and death of the remaining crew: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 12

Calypso; Odysseus held on Ogygia; his longing and weeping for home; offer of immortality; construction of the raft; Poseidon’s destruction of it: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 5

Odysseus carried home asleep by the Phaeacians and set ashore on Ithaca: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 13

Argos recognizes Odysseus after twenty years: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 17

“There is a season” / “a time for war, and a time for peace”: Ecclesiastes 3:1–8: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 3

“Time and chance happen to them all”: Ecclesiastes 9:11, NKJV: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 9:11

“Eat your bread with joy…drink your wine with a merry heart,” and the enjoyment of life and work: Ecclesiastes 9:7–10, paraphrased: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 9:7–10

“The Lord bless you and keep you…make His face shine upon you and give you peace”: Numbers 6:24–26: Bible Gateway, Numbers 6:24–26

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