It’s an unearthly warm late September night with the wind blowing in through the open front door. I might as well write something while I’m sitting here waiting for the cat to show up. Nothing like a soft, windy night to drive the beasts completely wild…
All right for the damn cat. Me, I can’t catch a break. Had a dream about a big blue rattlesnake on the kitchen counter. You don’t see those every day. When it turned to disappear through a hole in the wall, I saw it had a chopped-off tail. The rest of the dream had me wandering around trying to find my way out of a big outdoor party at some place in the country—one of those “manor house” parties, as I used to call them on the Eastern Shore—with all these people I knew but didn’t particularly want to be with doing things I didn’t care about (kind of like Facebook). Sometimes you just want to go home, you know?
But where would I turn?
Later I realized, that’s it! I’ve never been “home,” not really, as strange and sad as that may sound. The place that fits me like a glove, physically and spiritually, where longing ceases to exist and all I care about is being there, free to love and free to be. Without the other stuff.
I once had a professor, my thesis advisor, whom I respected immensely. He helped me earn a master’s degree in German that kept me out of Vietnam. When he heard that I’d accepted a teaching position at Wharton County Junior College and gotten my deferment, he wrote me a fine and generous letter, urging me to “grow like a tree in Wharton.” (That flew clean over my head in ’68, but I have some inkling of it now.) Never did grow like a tree, though, not in Wharton, Texas or anywhere else: more like a dung beetle, rolling its little ball of cow shit down the road.
Now the ball o’ poop is busted up, and I can’t roll no more. (It wasn’t fate, it’s just a schtick.) I either use what’s left for fertilizer or take off walking with nothing in my hands.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Very eloquent and expressive, John, but sometimes metaphors can mislead. Humans haven’t been rooted like trees since the middle ages. Home isn’t any longer capable of fitting anyone like a glove (if it ever was) and it doesn’t banish all longing. It’s sort of a necessary retreat from the storm – call it a roof over the head. Yet we long for something more because we’re human. That longing is the source of poetry and religion. But it can also be a delusion dangerous to one’s health. We forked naked critters are put here on middle earth to love and work in pain and confusion. Home is nothing more than a fleeting place of comfort and safety and someone to squeeze under the blankets during the cold nights until the sun rises once again, as it always will do, on the just and the unjust.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the metaphor is intended to direct one in the direction of a concept of “home” that isn’t necessarily physical.
I see that, mein Freund, and honour it. I trust narratives, and the narrative of your life, as you tell it here and in your books, might well be entitled “Search For Home”. English isn’t hardly adequate to describe the objective. Call it Heim or Heimat – big clanging capitalized words in the German language. Nicht wahr?
Germans have a penchant for mythologising. Indeed, isn’t there an old Norse myth which says there’s a tree supporting the entire world? I believe it has one of those weird Wagnerian names – Ydgrasil, the World Ash, or something like that. The myth would have it that we are all attached to that tree and hence to one another as parts of one mighty rooted organic collective. Very Teutonic.
So your piece is impressive, mein Freund, both as myth and personal narrative. However, another definition of home floated up in my own drier, less teutonic mind: “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. This comes from a poem of Robert Frost’s first encountered in Mrs. Blackford’s 10th grade English. It’s spoken dourly and grudgingly about a feckless wandering old fellow who has come “home” to die on a farm where he once worked (not very well) as a hired hand. The farmer he once worked for speaks those lines. His wife has a tenderer view. She says something like, “It’s a place we don’t have to deserve”. I like that formulation too, though fear it may be wishful thinking. In general dialectical views of any subject are more satisfying than single-minded ones because more true to the complexity of experience.
Be that as it may, poor Mrs. Blackford fell apart and died rather terribly long before her time. I hope she was at home.