Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again.” (At least, I think he did).
But you know what: you can.
I do it every Sunday. Mainly because I don’t want to miss Nana’s cooking; it’s in a class of its own…and I love going home, I do, but you want to know a secret: It’s also quite often very aggravating.
Why is that? Why is going home such a frustrating experience?
I've lost my keys...and the doorknob.
Sometimes, I think, it’s because as soon as I open that front door and step inside, I’ll see that nothing has changed, and I’ll feel like I haven’t changed either. And I hate that feeling.
Despite the unusuality (I’m creating this new word right this second; I think I am, anyway) of my family circumstances, I had a fairly conventional upbringing: a solid home life, food each evening, love, and church. But, I was reared by a great uncle, in Mississippi, and so…like many families in the Deep South, change was avoided, and at our most hospitable, conveniently forgotten when wedding invitations went out, or when pressed, allowed to sit at the table but thoroughly ingnored and not given a linen napkin or salad fork.
The couch had been the family couch since before I was born; the curtains had cost a fortune when purchased, pre-Depression, and so they were tolerated with their heaviness and coatings of dust and memory. The chairs at the dining room table had been in the family since before there was a family, they weren’t going anywhere…so much had been sacrificed for the minutiae and detritus, if you will, that we lived in, and splendidly, and all those little things that went into making the home a home…well, it’s understandable that it became a necessary security to make the home remain that way – unchanged.
It wasn’t a coffee table; it was a story. It wasn’t a piano; it was religion. And it wasn’t china, it was our history. We were curators as much as members of a family, and you don’t become a curator in a day. And a curator has great responsibility. (They’re not exactly a docent, for godsake).
To ignore that is a wide sin.
I’ve thought on this for quite awhile, as a means to calm myself from frustration. It’s not so much the expected conversations: you need insurance, check your tires, stop putting things on the credit card; any child, I think, would feel unloved without these petty nitpickings.
No, what it is, at least for me, is the lack of understanding about major things…at least the reciprocation of it.
But, I think I realize now why.
I look around the house and see things that I didn’t have to work for; things I expected to always be there: plates, sweet tea, arm chairs. My uncle looks around and sees things he’s given a life up to get, to take care of me when no one else would. He lives in a house of prior burden, and in it, he’s carried everything over and worked hard to deserve it, to keep deserving it. For me to turn a nose up at that is an insult, of course. He’s living in his major things. So, the reciprocation is difficult to measure. And, truth be told, all I really want, is a house like his…of my own.
But, here’s what the makes Deep South, deep: guilt.
We don’t grow up to move away, we’re not supposed to…even within the state, it seems, sometimes. We are “grown up” to be representatives of our people, our church community, our neighbors; it’s one reason we make great politicians, those of who do get away.
Down here, everyone has a vested interest, I guess, which is a great support but not the most Platonic of ideals. It takes a village, Hillary Clinton has remarked, and yes it does, but this village has a drawbridge.
They are scared because they can’t imagine another village, or why in the world, after all they’ve done for you, you’d want to go there, and stay, and trust me: no suitcase in the world is big enough to pack that kind of guilt.
There’s also no way to explain this need, which many of my generation have, on a routine, clockwork Sunday afternoon…and so what happens is you begin to talk about anything else under the ecclesiastical sun to steer the bulk of conversation away from “where you’re going” and you just talk about “where you’ve been, and what that was like.” You avoid the future, because it must involve the unknown and the unknown is built on change, and that avoidance takes so much energy that you leave home each weekend exhausted…and a weekend spent in exhaustion is aggravating. And you know, next Sunday is not that far away.
You keep squirreling away your privacy and plans and realize that the only way this will work is to jump ahead, make the move, then a U-Turn, then an announcement on your way out of town, and then you put your seatbelt on and drive and drive and drive until you realize you hadn’t packed anything, and that’s ok, because nothing is still better than guilt. Shock is the only salvation we still possess.
Yet, we keep going home, don’t we? Either to prove Wolfe wrong, or dig a deeper hole in the front yard. Ironically, you can’t dig a deep hole anywhere hear a magnolia. The roots are too hungry.
I guess the biggest frustration, really, in going home again, is that of expectation. Because buried beneath the heart in all of us is a fear of meeting that expectation: I’m sure parents, even great uncles, know this – the dreaded what ifs – what if my child is that rare breed who can’t wait to be kicked from the nest? I was that child. What if my child is the one who thinks he can make a difference? I was that child, too…still am. What if my child is a dreamer, a writer, an actor, a singer, a lover, a mover? What if, what if, what if. I am, I’m all of them, and everyday I try to decide just which child I am, was, or want to be, still.
I love my uncle more than anything else in the world. But, I’m also not through with the world, yet. The other side of the problem is that I’m too ready to move. The timing’s not right, then. But, the need, the desire, the drive is.
Still, I stall on the idea of expectation.
I’m supposed to be working on one of my new plays, right now, for instance, and even though I argue with editors and friends and workshoppers on my slow progress(es) with anything I write, strung out over a strange array of “valid excuses,” the truth is I’m scared to death I won’t meet their expectations. Just like I keep straddling the fence on my next move, literal and meta, because I’m scared not of what I can’t see ahead of me, but of what I’ll see when I look back.
And for the record, I rarely use salt in my cooking; the last thing I need is a pillar of it.
So, for the time being, I keep going home. Out of respect, which some in my life never understood, and to learn a little more before heading out again. There’s something, I suppose, that seems regressive about keeping a finger on old roots; but, for me, there’s something so necessarily alluring about the roughness of those old roots that I’m not sure I could remember if I let go of them just yet.
It’s what writers do. And that’s what I am.
At least, today.
The Clever Kris 