Leaving, or A Quick Summary of the History of My Patheticism

I have very vivid memories of my early, extended experiences away from home. It’s a large folder in my mind – jammed and overflowing with papers, photographs, little gray cassette tapes, and letters that were never sent. It sits in a far corner of my brain in a small cardboard box labeled with a thick sharpie written message: BAD MEMORIES.

It’s an unfortunate conflict that I have raging within my body – a mixture of a dashing, restless spirit longing for adventure and new unseen worlds and a much older, much grumpier spirit that wears an itchy brown cardigan, wheezes frequently, and constantly complains (by knocking its stick on its ceiling and turning up the volume on its 1930s polka anthology) about the other spirit staying up too late, being too loud, and talking too much about places outside of home. It’s a very passive-aggressive conflict, which partly explains why it remains unresolved to this day. It’s embarrassing, but it’s true. I simply don’t like leaving home (suggesting that my rattling, wheezing spirit is currently winning the battle of passive-aggression).

I’m not certain of the roots of my being pathetic, though like I said, I have plenty of material which probably helped it fester into a full-blown case of homebodiness. I’ll give two examples – embarrassing as they are.

1. McCallie Sports Camp, Summer 2001, Chattanooga, TN:

In hindsight, I seriously don't understand what it was that compelled me to agree to going to this. Many years earlier, I had determined that I detested the camp life as being a miserable week away from home in which private living habits (any and all things of the bathroom, sleeping, and eating) were suddenly put into a schedule - so uncharacteristically regimented for the summer - as well as on public display. So by the time I had to decide whether or not to do McCallie Sports Camp, I already had a thick portfolio of wretched camp experiences (in which letters from home were like drowning gulps of fresh air and in which songs sung with guitar and honeyed voices around campfires became demonic incantations to bind children forever to this hot, itchy place in the woods) that should have dissuaded me from ever even considering this camp. And yet, somehow, I caved and agreed to go for two weeks to a sports camp in Tennessee with my friend Packer.

As you would expect (and as I should have known) it was terrible. Perfectly god-awful. I could probably attribute any premature aging, graying, and high blood pressure to those two weeks in Chattanooga. From the stress of using the bathroom in public to coming to terms with trying to enter into a camp society whose hierarchy had been determined many summers before we arrived (we were pariahs - no matter our speed, talent, or charm), Packer and I could only wish of being home. In fact, so intense was our homesickness that we would rush back to our room after lunch and dinner to mark off each HALF-day that passed in a make-shift-pencil-drawn calendar we drew on the inside of one of our desk drawers.

My dad jokes - with a tinge of concern - that I'll end up on a psychiatrist's couch one day talking about this experience...

2. Anonymous Friends’ Houses, Grades 2-6, Jackson, MS:

In addition to my general aversion to camps, another trying hurdle for me was spending the nights at friends’ houses. I resist to write any of this only because I fear that any friend with whom I did not make it through the night will become suspicious of my 6^th grade motives; however, I will say it was never personal. Rather, it was simply my general discomfort with the unknown.

Needless to say, I had a habit – unfortunate and embarrassing I readily admit – of finding ways to avoid spending the night with friends at their houses. Whether it was the irrational fear that my friend’s creaky and unknown house was more subject to catching fire spontaneously than mine or the more basic longing for my own bed and more familiar monsters-in-the-closet, I would every once in a while (and I believe is the first time I’m admitting this) conjure up some malady (wheezing, upset stomach, etc) that demanded that I return home to sleep.

Today, in my older and comparatively wiser state, I realize how terrible a thing to do this was, but as a child – not knowing better – there were few feelings I cherished more than to see my dad – hair slightly disheveled and eyes heavy with recent sleep - drive up in our car to take me back home on a road that seemed somewhat celestial in the way that the street lights that hovered above our car streamed together and guided us home to my own bed – safe, warm, and known.

****

I write all of this to say that I've never been good at leaving home. In the past - and this past week as I packed my bags in preparation for (or fear of) this trip - my body has exhibited symptoms that only serve to remind me of the fact that I'm leaving. I know this all a bit overwhelmingly dramatic in the way I'm describing this, but I'd like to extend the metaphor just a touch more to compare it to the feeling a young sapling must feel upon, after having setting its roots firmly into the warm soil of its home, being ripped from the ground - roots gory with dirt and mangled worms. But, truly, that aside, I feel the pangs of leaving home throughout my entire body. The dinner the night before is typically accompanied by mild indigestion, my heart beats a bit faster, I stay up late the night before because I forget to pack (but also because I won't be able to sleep before that time, anyway).

The morning of departure (I usually make my plane reservations at early morning hours...) is equally miserable, because on top of not wanting to go, my traveling inadequacies are pointed out throughout the morning. So while I lie propped naked against the wall of my shower, marinating in the warm water that reminds me so much of my covers, my parents come in and out of the bathroom to ask me over the shower curtain about things that I've forgotten.

"Did you remember your toothbrush?"

"Yes." (Victory!)

"What about a tie?"

"Front pocket..." (A-ha!)

"Benadryl"

Silence (shit!).

"Benadryl??"

"Um, well no."

"What about your epi-pen?"

(God...) "No, I think it's...somewhere...I don't know"

The ping-ponging rally over the shower curtain ends in a blow-out: my parents the obvious victors.

Additionally, my dog - Bitsy - senses when I'm leaving and her depressed/curled peeking over her dog-bed only increases my own depression. She also usually rides in the car to the airport, which climaxes in a stringy crescendo of whines and whimpers as our car slows to a stop at the arrivals gate. Feeling carsick and already homesick, I hug my parents and try to acknowledge Bitsy - who in her fury has suddenly become disinterested (for the first time in days) about where I go.

I leave - feeling like shit, overloaded with bags - and wave goodbye to my parents as my mom taps on the window, mouthing, "I love you" - something I already knew (even when they were, in my attempt at packing, exposing me as a traveling fraud).

*****

My blog this summer is going to focus on (though not exclusively) the idea of home and place. It's something that I think fits with what I'm hoping/trying to do this summer in traveling around the country talking with Mississippians about leaving Mississippi. And though my interviews are much more site-specific (with Mississippi being my frame of reference), I'm hoping to find out about what it means to leave one's home - willingly or not. I'm hoping to explore the connections that we keep or don't keep with our homes. And ultimately, I want to find out what home (what a beautiful word it is) really is....but more on that later.

So, for this blog, I'll most likely just be writing about random little nothings that happen along the way in my travels, but I hope also not to lose completely the thought of home - whatever home may be.

I'm traveling to DC first (only a few more days here...late start on this blog...more on DC soon) and then on to NYC and then everywhere else.

Lastly, I'll say as a word of warning to those of you who were kind of enough to read my blog in Vietnam last summer, this one has great potential to be very different. There's a certain awe and wonder that overtakes a person in a foreign land, where one's language is not spoken, so I can't promise anything half as interesting as what Vietnam gave me; however, I do hope you'll bear with me...after all, if I live up to anything I just wrote about, homesickness (and time away from home) is a powerful thing that can, it seems, bring out the worst (or maybe, just perhaps, the best) in us all.

I'm going there to see my mother
She said she'd meet me when I come
I'm only going over Jordan
I'm only going over home

I love those words because - to me at least - there's something about "going" that means finally coming home...wherever that may be.

I'll be writing more (coherently) soon.

Love and miss you all.