The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in Indiana was a damn White Castle. Seriously. 7, 8 years, and the first thing I lay my eyes on is the White Castle outside Union Station in Indy. And I smirked. I smirked because in Pennsylvania, it would have been a Sheetz MTO Mart. Geographical humor never fails to humor me by showing itself, pop! at just the right second.
I tell you what, though. On the way back to PA, I was looking for that first Sheetz like the landscape outside the bus window was a Seek-and-Find book with a million dollar prize stapled to the cover. Here's a test for you: if you ever doubt whether the place you're in is your true home, leave it for 9 days and go revisit the ghosts of your past. By the time I returned to my present, fully to my present, every cell in my body was pulling me East. Pennsylvania was a magnet, and I was polarized. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
There is now a Whole Foods Co-op and Cafe in the town next door to where I grew up. Geographical humor again. If you know anything about where I grew up, a whole foods co-op is a huge leap up the civility chain. Especially considering that when it comes to bus services, this town dumps their passengers at the side of the road next to a gas station which is across from the police station, and the police station is a mobile home. Banjos: I hear 'em.
My friends and I ate there, figuring it a safe bet that nobody from my gene pool would be visiting someplace so healthy. To tell you the truth though, I wasn't really looking to avoid my gene pool. Part of my reason for going back to Indiana was a certain inexplicable desire to see how many of those fishes I could handle. I made a halfhearted attempt at veiling my presence, but that was mainly to service some outdated sense of the fugitive child's decorum that still sleeps here and there inside me. To put it simply, when you duck and run once, it becomes a reflex and you keep doing it till you wear yourself out, until suddenly it occurs to you that you're strong enough now to simply stand tall and observe. And so that is what I did: I stood tall and observed.
Parts of it felt like an out-of-body experience, or like I was visiting my past as someone else, some anthropologist come to do cultural immersion. Life immersion. To take my life, as it is and as it had been, and study it by juxtaposing the two realities and one-two stepping between them. So many things had changed. So many things had not. I became momentarily afraid of confusing myself in the time travel: Who was I, again? But that did not happen. The present is in many ways inextricably linked with the past, but I don't have to stare at the individual links to figure out which is which these days. We all have pasts. We all have todays. God willing, we'll all have tomorrows. And we carry them, all the yesterdays and right nows and tomorrows, all around with us, all at once. It's second nature. It's the thinking about it that makes it complicated.
There were hard things, though they were not what I expected them to be. I expected to freak out in a major, major way if I had to see my parents, but I rode in a car with my mother. An enclosed space! With my mother! I talked to her. Polite chit-chat and all that. Oh, have you ever tried cutting out your bangs? You're re-doing the den? That's neat. At the end of the night, I remembered what it was about her that had driven me away in the first place. I still couldn't name it, never have been able to, but it was still there: something vital is missing in my mother. She talks and laughs, blinks and breathes, smiles and frowns, but there's not enough of what makes her human to go around coloring her in and completing the picture. It's like she's trying to stretch herself over the head of the barrel that is her life, but she can't quite make it from one side to the other. I used to demonize her for this. God knows I still have the right to point and judge and begrudge her the things she did to me, but I don't feel the need for that anymore. I felt pity for this piece-of-a-woman. Somehow, some way, whatever happened to her, I'm not sure she could've stopped it. I'm not sure she even knew it was happening until it, whatever it was, whatever it is, was already there. Like a cancer you don't know is growing till it's too late to do anything but die. I have a mother, and there is something wrong with her that no one may ever be able to name. That's how it is. No use kicking against it.
I can say all that, but I would've removed my left kidney and hacked it to bits with a garden spade if I'd needed to, to avoid Mary. The wound where Mother Mary used to be is somehow still a gaping chasm I don't even want to peek into. I can't even begin to explain it. Thankfully, she was on her own trip, and we smoothly passed by each other with not so much as a ripple in the water of that lake of tears.
Did you know the house I did the most memorable parts of my growing up in, the basement and Sweetie-Cat house, is gone? It is. Just gone. I looked up on the hill where it should have been, and that hill was bare of anything but weeds. I almost made Chelsey turn the car around and go back so I could search for it in the tall grass like a lost trinket. It's a funny feeling, knowing that something that was once so real to everyone you knew is now only real in your own memory. I wouldn't say I felt grief, exactly, but the place where that house should have been is like the hole in your mouth after a lost tooth: you just keep poking your tongue in. I just keep poking my tongue in to the empty space once occupied by Sweetie-Cat house and feeling all the strange new dimensions. There is building space there now. What will I make, or what will grow of its own accord, out of the soil of that memory? I will watch awhile, and see.
Then, of course, all things new. Lina being 2. Gideon being here, the solid heft of him, the weight of him asleep in my arms, his still-new eyes trying to find and hold my face. Sitting with a dear old friend at dinner, trying to puzzle out how things work now that both parties, not just her, not just the one, are adults standing on equal ground. The ease of familiarity and fondness interwoven with awkward baby steps trying to cover new territory: the territory of me realizing how difficult it must have been for her, then younger than I am now, to have done what she did for me. This epiphany is a new piece of furniture in the space of my mind. I'm still walking around it, measuring it, looking for somewhere it will fit. It may become, for awhile, like that old chair you don't want but just can't get rid of. I guess everyone's attic has a little clutter, eh?
I was reminded of what is truly family, once again. Oh, tiny hands. Oh, books and milk cups. Oh, my brother-in-law awkwardly patting me on the shoulder for the first time, to say goodnight and thanks for helping. Oh, my picture on the wall with all the other pictures of family. Oh, my sister's earnest effort to crochet her first-ever blanket and make it for me, just because she wants to give me something she thought about out of love and worked on with her own 2 hands. I'd take the world's longest chain stitch and be warm forever, honey.
And I was reminded what home is. Not so much a sense of place, though I was infinitely relieved when I got into Lock Haven today and the mountains circled me like so many protective giants, when I saw the Susquehanna spread out to either side of the bridge, welcoming me back. Home is the same as family. Home is a love, is a sense of freedom and bondage all at once, a push and a pull. Home is where you choose to go when you know you're dying and you want to watch the water, smell the air, in a place where you have left so many of your life's allotment of footprints. Home is where and what you choose to love, when you could just as easily or maybe even more easily train yourself to love somewhere else, something else. It is possible to have more than one home, and divide your heart like an orange to mark the map. But this, for me, right now, is the place I have my whole orange. I'm thinking about those segments, but I haven't peeled that orange yet and cut them out. We'll see. I'll see. I read a quote in a novel on the road that makes a tidy little package of my thoughts:
"She who ain't free not to love ain't free to love."
Amen.
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