Failures in Existential Homecomings

I went home for Thanksgiving this year. It was wonderful. It was weird. It was interesting.

Home is a strange concept for me, given that I don't really have one. Not in a tragic way, of course, but in a way that makes 'the Holidays' somewhat emotionally complicated. Especially as I get older and messier. And wiser. (Somewhat wiser.)

Amherst is one home, certainly, It's where I grew up, the place that exists in a dozen dimensions stacked on each other, perspectives of my world at 8, 12, 16, 20, 25, 30...But I've left, and my brother's left, and our parents left. So it's still home, in a way, still the place I started, but all my time there is woven through with this faint, constant anxiety. It's a whimpering, underlying loneliness, a mild love panic - whatever it means, it's a specific kind of emptiness that I don't feel anywhere else: This was home. But I have to leave soon. This is not my base anymore.

Every place has had it's moments. In New Orleans, I felt like a kindred with an entire city, its whole spirit, like everything strange and terrible that I was was true, and real, but also beautiful and fascinating, and that all that twisted chaos was probably just fine.

Then Boston, the strange little second adolescence I threw myself into because I apparently never tire of late nights and melodrama, excessive introspection and cheap wine, skating along the poverty line between champagne brunches. And I love it there still, I have family by blood, and families we made up just with our hearts, and being back there is the best mirror, of how much has changed and how much is the same and how much we can love each other, and how much of that is forever. But it's not home anymore, either. There's no place that is just mine, all the way through.

My parents live in Florida, my brother lives in Colorado. When I'm with them, I'm home, because that's my team, but underneath all the best parts is the same low-level hum that buzzes through the base of my brain when I'm in Amherst: This was home. But I have to leave soon. There's nothing permanent for me here.

I used to hate the expression 'Home Is Where the Heart Is', because fuck you, my heart is everywhere.

Baylor and I got back late last night, to an empty apartment that smelled like roses and sandalwood from the incense burning when Kyle picked us up on Wednesday. I spent half an hour in the shower steaming the car-ride stiffness out of my muscles and rubbing my sides where they were still sore from the night before, when F and I stayed up belly-laughing over a decade's worth of memories, photos and videos capturing hundreds of stupid, tiny, wonderful moments, dozens we'd forgotten about, all of them we were so happy to have remembered. And it occurred to me that was home, too, inside those images were my parents, and my brother, my friends, place we've been, things we've seen, the people we were, a whole record that doesn't register any less deeply simply because it's not a physical place.

Earlier that day, I sat in the basement of Bartlett Hall with two of my favorite people on the planet, people I didn't get to meet until well into my Boston days. One of them is at UMass now, teaching classes in the building where I spent days of my undergraduate life, books spread out across beat up wooden desks tucked into the second floor landing, baking in the greenhouse heat cooked up by window panes and winter sunlight. I hadn't been inside in the better part of a decade, but here I was again, for the simple reason that two of my worlds happened to bump into each other on the same day. There was a time when that would have upset me greatly, a time when I favored strict compartmentalization to all other life-love organizational systems, but I'm not really like that anymore. Now I like it when my edges blur.

This ended differently than I intended. This morning, I thought I was going to write about how I sort of understand some things that terrify me - commitment, responsibility, regularity, maturity - much better when I think about them in the context of Home. Someplace to go back to. Some place that is all yours. But it was going to be something of a backhanded compliment, and I don't want to do that now. Now I just want to say that I think maybe we spend our whole lives coming home, and that's not nearly as depressing as it sounds. It gives us something to aspire to.

When I got out of the shower last night, I put on an old Temptation's album I stole from my brother and emailed my parents to let them know we got back safely, albeit without my phone charger (hence the email). Baylor was passed out beside me, purring in that way unique to Staffies, exhausted in that way unique to small children and animals after long days of travelling. When I got into bed, that humming was still there, the one that never lets me forget that this good thing will end, too. They all will! But maybe that's not the best way to think about it.

That hum tells us that things will pass, yes. But it's sure there a lot. So maybe it's not there to bum me out. Maybe it's there to keep my eyes open. Like an appreciation alert. Like there are too many good things wherever I go, and I'm never going to get to them all. And that's probably just fine.

On Changing Course; Or: Realizing I Didn't Cause Hurricane Katrina, After All

Next door to my house is the Glover Park Market. (In most other neighborhoods I've lived in, we'd call this 'the bodega'.) On the other side of that, there's a pseudo-parking lot -- more of a delivery zone, really, but people park there. There's one car that's there all the time: an ancient, mustardy yellow Toyota wagon with a single bumper sticker, a Turkish proverb:

"No matter how far you've gone down the wrong path, turn back."

I love that. Now.

I fought with it for a while. For a while, it didn't make enough sense. What if something only SEEMS like the wrong path, because it's hard? And what if you turn back, and later you realize it had been the right path all along?

Then I thought: 'I suppose you could just turn back then, too.'

The last two weeks have been hard. The entirety of 2012 has been a bit if a bastard, frankly, but woven through with bolts of the sublimely wonderful; it's hardly like I've been locked in a medieval dungeon. Still, when it's hard, it's easy to play 'what if'. What if I'd stayed, what if I'd turned left, what if I hadn't asked. What if I'd turned back then? What if I turn back now?

In August of 2003, I was 21 years old. The day after the blackout that shut down much of the northeastern United States, my father and I left Amherst, packed up Gladys, my ancient white ES 300, already the heroine of so many stories, and drove south, to New Orleans, where I'd start at Tulane Law in a less than a week. I was happy, ambitious, excited. Pops and I played endless games of 'guess the population of...', ate at a number of fine roadside Cracker Barrels. I fussed with my cranky CD-changer, popped dozens of nicotine lozenges out of their foil for him while he drove down the center of empty highways. Somewhere in Virginia, Gladys lost a piece of muffler, and announced our presence like a stock-car when we pulled in anywhere. The trip took three days.

Three years later we'd repeat the drive, in reverse, Pops at the wheel of my mother's Tourareg this time, accompanied by an additional passenger: Baylor, snoozing contentedly in a back-seat cave of duffel bags and Irish suitcases. I was a different person on this drive* so entirely divorced from the proud 21-year-old with her new fondness for martinis and morbidly expensive denim. I felt raw, and tired, drained of all sweetness, sharp at the corners with a new fear of the future. I didn't even know where I'd be living until we crossed into Pennsylvania. What happened?

I was turning back.

Midway through the second semester of my 2L year, I fell apart. I remember those months in bits and flashes, like scanning radio stations. Sometimes I hit on something I recognize, try to go back and catch the signal, but I fumble and it's gone, static. There are chunks of the important things: the cross country trip to LA with B, Colorado and canyons; the best meal of my life, scallops at Dante's Kitchen; swimming home from F+M's after the freakest storm, the most intense flood we'd ever see, until later. And of, course, the moment I decided to turn back:

It was the end of the semester, before exams. I'd lined up an internship at the National Trust for Historic Preservation in DC (how curious, six years later, I'd take a job in historic preservation, three minutes away from their office) I found a sublet in Logan Circle with a girl and her dog who seemed just lovely. Everything was just as it should be.

So it surprised even me, that weekend afternoon in the pitch-black shower (I did not fucking care, about anything, especially not the burned-out light bulb in the shower, which I couldn't reach anyway, which I never remembered until I was already in the damn shower... Besides, the ability to cleanly shave your legs in complete darkness is a skill you'll never regret possessing) when I whispered to myself "You don't have to do this" and felt like I'd inhaled after months of not even realizing I'd been holding my breath. I said it again, "You don't have to do this", and my knees actually buckled, dizzy with this freedom I hadn't realized I'd had at hand all along.

And I didn't do it. I didn't do any of it.

I pulled out of everything. I went home. I went to Ireland with my family, for what we all acknowledged would be our last Original Recipe Family Vacation: Mom, Dad, kids, and I think, expressly because of that bittersweet, it was the best vacation I've ever had. Much of that summer was dark and lonely and awful -- sometimes a lot of weird shit has happened to the path since the first time you walked down it, and it can be a goddamn CHALLENGE to traverse, in reverse. I'd gone a long ways. It might have been easier to just keep going. I didn't get it, not just then, that part of turning back meant finishing what I'd started. Law school is painful enough when you want to be there.

I don't believe in God, per se, I never really have, but I prayed to something every day and night that summer: Please, Please, Please. Don't Make Me Go Back. But it seemed like no one listened, because in August 2005 I was standing in Louis Armstrong International Airport waiting for a ride, rooted to nothing except a giant duffel bag I'd stuffed too heavy to move under my own power.

I was back for exactly a week when Hurricane Katrina showed up on the Doppler Radar. And I went home again.

So, you see - and I've only admitted this to a few people, it's so ferociously crazy - for years I thought Hurricane Katrina was, at least partially, my fault. (The Army Corps needs to take their blame, ALWAYS.) Like the grown child I still am, I thought the power of my magical thoughts had destroyed thousands of lives just so I could sleep on a mattress on the floor of my adolescent bedroom, so I could lie paralyzed with indecision down the hall from my parents. So I could wrap myself in the cocoon of Amherst, where nothing bad could ever really happen, where nothing had to be real, because if you squint hard, you can see everything through your child-eyes.

I realize now, it was just part of the road back. If I'd gone to DC that summer, I might have realized that I loved old buildings, but not in the legal sense. I might have turned back then. Or maybe it would have taken longer. I don't get to know that, that alternate future. But since then, I've learned to trust myself more, to follow what feels right, even if it looks crazy. And that was actually enough.

I said here, four years ago (good lord!), that we always return to our truest states, whether by pressure or force or space or time. We just do. Because it's our nature. I still believe that. Hurricane Katrina would have happened either way. Of the millions of lives that storm affected, the stories of me and mine are just one tiny, relatively uninteresting tributary.

So, really, this was all to say: when it's the wrong path, I think there's a moment when you just know. And it doesn't mean it's an easy decision, or a clear one, but you get where you're supposed to be in the end: your life will take you to all the important stops, if you listen to it, if you let it.

Until then, as my father says: just keep writing.


*I called my father before I posted this, specifically to ask how I was on that ride back. He said I seemed relaxed and happy to be done, so at least I put on a nice face. And I'm glad I called to ask, because of all the things I don't remember about that year, I do remember that drive, and how lucky am I, that every long drive with my father has been a wonderful one. 

Girls, Girls, Girls Pt. 5794

Right before I started second grade, my parents moved us back to Amherst for the second, and final, time. I remember my first day at Wildwood the way I remember the first day of everything: I was really anxious, and really bored.

When you grow up in a college town, there are always new kids in class. In the fall of 1988, this crop included myself, and a French girl whose parents were visiting at Amherst for the semester. They were living on Lincoln Avenue, the gorgeous street downtown where the college keeps some grand old houses for visiting professors and their families.

I don't remember much about her. What I do remember, I don't trust. But my brain says she was petite and blond with skin like milk and a perfect petal mouth and she wore blue dresses every day. So, yeah. If Madeleine and Bridgette Bardot had a baby. Whatever. She wasn't imaginary.

Anyway, I love everything French, and her - let's call her Madeleine Bridgette - eighth birthday party is probably why. Don't even talk shit. I call them frites, bitches.

This party. I want to say it was in November. There was a scavenger hunt where we each had to follow a different colored string that wound through the house. At the stairs - the amazing, sweeping central stairs - a massive tangle derailed the hunt as 15 second-graders extricated their string from the yarny cluster-bang, but no one CARED, because they were the kind of stairs people dance down in musicals. The yarn, when finally untangled, led us all to different - but equally wonderful - prizes, scattered under old oak and maple trees, concealed amongst the rhododendrons, nestled against the mossy side of rocks.

And they fed us radishes. I don't think I'd ever had a radish before (at seven! The shame!) Madeleine-Bridgette's father cut one in half, sprinkled salt on the skin, and handed it to me. I think I ate like, four. Then I demanded my parents buy me radishes to sprinkle salt on and devour. (That's how I know it all happened. Whenever radishes are brought up - which isn't that often, but more often than you might think - my parents remind me of this.) All their soap smelled like lavender. The windows were leaded glass, and there were pillows on the floor of the living room, like you were supposed to sit there.

When my parents came to get me, I was not feeling going back to my American house to watch Back to the Future Part 2 for the eleventy billionth time*.

School let out early the day before Christmas break. We lined up against the door, waiting to be dismissed, or however they did that shit. When we finally were, Madeleine Bridgette broke from the line (I think we lined up by buses? I walked to school - when no one cares when you leave, you stand at the end of the line) and ran back to me. She hugged me hard and kissed the side of my face twice.

"Goodbye, Katie!" she chirped in that ADORABLE accent all foreign children have. "I will never see you again!" Then she kissed me again and ran out the door. I remember leaning back against the wall and thinking "How would she know that?"

Because she just did, I guess? It's been 23 years, and of course she was right. I don't even know what reminded me of this. It's just...how many people do you say goodbye to, totally accepting - expecting - that you'll see them again whenever you'd like? That this is your show, you pick the players? Nah, son. We've got no control over anything.

Also, how fucking cool are French people? Girlfriend was seven years old and dropped some truth that took me TWENTY THREE YEARS to process.

Madeleine Bridgette, I do wonder where you are. I hope everything's turning out wonderfully. Hugs, baby girl.

** That is a straight-up lie. I love BTTFPT . I enjoyed every viewing. On Saturday mornings, before Pops woke up, Beets and I made cushion forts while watching Biff's alternate reality play out. If I remember correctly, we had some pretty advanced conversations about the space-time continuum for people too small to reach the cereal without climbing on a counter.

Imaginary Band of the Month

Rocketship of Intelligence!

A revolving-member outfit that uses only instruments available to elementary school children. (Xylophones in various sizes, bongos, triangles and cowbells, maracas, tambourines, and gourds - you know, what you played in elementary school music class if you grew up in a hippie college town.)

This concept was developed over drinks on Tuesday when Leila, Sarah and I -- each a product of Amherst Public Schools -- discovered that we all shared the childhood experience of ironically singing slave songs while doing chores.