Surprise visits, faraway folk

This morning a young girl I know, told me how she and her boyfriend had gone home for the weekend. Her parents live a four hour train ride away so she only sees them about every couple of months. This weekend was a surprise visit, only her sister knew that they were coming. The way she described the greeting she received, her father who saw her at the end of the road and couldn't believe his eyes, soon had me in tears. I already knew how much her father and mother missed her. They have had a life-size photo of her put up in their sitting-room, and not a day goes by that her dad doesn't try and win the lottery to get her back home. In our age many people move freely round the globe, talking on Skype and sending emails. Others have to move away from home to find work or for other reasons. But this young girl's experience, understood perfectly. It went straight to my heart. My father always told me that he didn't want any surprise visits, that he loved looking forward to me coming, actually that was the best part, because once I got there he knew it was a matter of time before I had to go. It was always sort of bitter sweet, both of us pretending that we were part of each other's daily lives.
Once my uncle was given a surprise party, for his eightieth birthday. He didn't know anything about it. When he was lead into the village hall where we were all waiting, he looked quite overcome and extremely emotional. Also dangerously red in the face. There we all were, many of us who he hadn't seen for a long time. He confided in me later, that he hadn't enjoyed it at all. He said he had been feeling hurt and left out for weeks. My auntie, his wife, had been going off on her own, telling him she was going to babysit, and he wasn't invited. In fact she was busy making stacks of cakes and pies to put in the freezer for the party. He had felt so left out that he was thinking of asking for a divorce. Well, he was my uncle, a bit melodramatic, like me.

I think that this poem by Wordsworth will strike a chord with anyone who knows what it's like to miss people  or have to keep any other deep emotion inside, so as not to get in the way of every day living.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to is tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears

(Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)