A Sort of Homecoming
I flew in from Albuquerque, and boy are my arms tired. From dragging my children and their bags through four airports.
What’s the opposite of vacation? Vacation with children. Traveling, you’ve gotta be the pack-horse, the butler, the maid, the tour-guide – the fantasy tour-guide, since sometimes you’ve gotta make something up, to stop them from singing “ninety-nine bottles of ‘are we there yet?’” Point at some crag in the distance, “look! That rock formation over there, I think that’s the backdrop of a scene from Young Guns II!” “Dad. We’ve never seen Young Guns II.”
You become the museum-guard for an Air B&B, “don’t touch that!” “Don’t flush that!” “No, we’re not marking our heights on the door-frame here!” You’ve got to be a prison-warden in the airport, which is impossible because an airport is the exact, perfect opposite of a jail – open doors everywhere, zillions of strangers literally flying in and out.
There’s a delicate balance between, on the one hand, hissing at your kid to be considerate and quiet on the plane, and on the other hand, trying not to look like an abusive hissy parent. And William, my five-year-old, he’s gotta touch everything, every fixture in the bathroom, every arm-rest on the plane, every menu in every restaurant, you turn around and he’s chewing on a backpack strap which you’ve dragged all over creation. “Dude. If you get sick and throw up on that plane they’re gonna kick us out. They’ll have to open the window for the smell, the whole thing de-pressurizes.”
When my Mom comes to visit, the day before she flies back to Albuquerque, she’ll stop by with a bag, “here’s half a package of crackers, here’s an open bottle of wine with one glass left, etc.” And I think “Thanks, but we’ve got crackers here. And you’re a refugee! As a child you filled a backpack and escaped the Soviet invasion of Hungary, left everything behind, how are you getting so sentimental about a package with two cookies left in it now? You’re holding it like it’s the last known photograph of your uncle who got abducted to the Gulag. This half-package of crackers – is this my inheritance?” Like, did you pay airport-rate for it?
Now I understand. Because when you’re traveling, half a package of crackers can be the difference, it can stave off a nervous breakdown. When you know it might be an hour till you can eat, and just knowing it’s there. Yes, we have calories in the car. To shut the kids up long enough so we can leave the tourist plaza and find a greasy-spoon on the highway, save five bucks a plate, which with six people traveling, plus credit card interest, adds up to tuition money. But you need those crackers to get the kids quiet long enough. And that bottle of wine you bought, which you’ve been rationing to yourself, rewards for getting through each day, and you save that last bit for in case you go insane at the last minute. So by the time you’re packing for th airport, each of these things has become a magical talisman, a life-raft in the storm. And then you can’t pack it so you hand it off, “Here, Mom, here are these scraps, here’s a half-roll of paper-towels that saved us from having to pay the car-rental people a hundred bucks because of a spill.” And she looks at it, “Um, we have paper towels here.”
It’s like that interesting rock you find, where you’re stuck in a tourist trap with the kids, trying to steer them past the souvenir shop so you make a really big show out of– “Oh! Look at this! Everybody come around, look at this interesting rock! Wow! It’s got little crystals in it! Oh boy!” You pick it up, like it’s the Holy Grail, and suddenly all the kids are fighting and clawing and shouting, “He got a long turn with the rock! It’s my turn! Back off, you’re blocking the sun with your big-head shadow!” So you kill five minutes and save fifty bucks on souvenirs. And then you get home, nobody cares about the rock, they’re back to fighting over the tablet, the Nintendo, whatever. “Hey, I’ve got an idea – while he takes his turn with the game, why don’t you spend fifteen minutes staring at the cool rock we found in New Mexico?” “Dad. Nobody cares about a rock.” And you put it somewhere, as a little reminder of that time you staved off a whole tsunami of kid tantrums, whatever, but three months later you find it, “What’s this rock doing here? Did one of the kids bring it inside?” They’ll end up throwing it through a window, so you toss it out into the driveway. And who knows? Maybe some New Mexico tourist in Buffalo is dragging their kids down the sidewalk, “Oh! Oh boy, look at this! What an amazing rock!” And then it goes back and ends up in their driveway where it came from.
We don’t necessarily consider Western New York an “exotic location” – we live here! Once you’ve kicked the gray, salted ice off the wheel-well of your car, the honeymoon is over. We’re married to this place, we’ve lived with its seasonal depression, greeted its cranky mornings, we’ve heard all its old stories, it is un-mysterious. But every time I go away for a few days and then return, I’m reminded of how singularly lovely this place can be. How dynamic. And how comfortable! I know where everything is and how it works! It’s like the couple in the “Pina Colada” song – they got bored with their old routine, but then realized what they really needed was to re-discover each other. The song is called “Escape,” but really it’s about homecoming.
By the way, I once saw an interview with Rupert Holmes, who wrote the “Pina Colada” song, and in the midst of it he stared desperately straight into the camera and said “People, please! If you see me in a bar, don’t walk up and hand me a Pina Colada! Ask me what I want!” It turns out maybe at some point in 1979 a Pina Colada seemed like a nice fantasy, but now he’s stuck with it, and wishes he could escape it. I wonder if the sound of a blender sends him ducking under a table.
Anyway, where were we? Homecoming.
Migration, Pilgrimage and Crusade
Homecoming is a recent development in human history – our whole concept of ‘home’ is only a few thousand years old. For hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years humanity was a migratory species. Small tribes of people, foraging in a spot till it was picked pretty clean, then moving a couple miles to the next spot. Of course this was easier before they had giant personal libraries and record collections and furniture, plus houses to keep their stuff dry. Before high-rises and banks, cathedrals and casinos, folks were mobile. And they could easily migrate northward in summer and south in winter, like birds – these days you’ve got to have a lot in the bank to live ‘free as a bird,’ only folks who wisely stored up their treasure can afford to migrate (we call them ‘snowbirds’).
A few thousand years ago, with the rise of full-time farming, we start to see the first homesteads. Parcels of land kind-of belonged to people, but really people belonged to the land. Medieval European serfs didn’t get to take vacations, except for the occasional pilgrimage to the Vatican, or if a Crusade was declared. The first Crusade invited farmers from all over Europe on a massive tourist trek to paradise (Paradise being the Pope’s promise of instant admission to heaven if one died on the Crusade). Needless to say, for many it was a one-way trip, but for those who made it home from Crusading, the drudgery of European feudalism must have taken on a whole new layer of enchantment.
A pilgrimage to the Vatican was a bit like a modern amusement park, in that you could return with some magical memories and seven years of crushing debt. The differences were that the economic burden was somewhat offset by atoning for some sins, looking forward to a discount on one’s Purgatory stay. Also instead of rides, you had to stand in line all day to kiss a skull that may have been Saint Peter (or may have been anybody, Peter was a pretty common name for skulls).
There’s an old joke about a priest on a pilgrimage to the Vatican. On the road he passed a woman weeping in the fields, asked why and she responded, “because my husband and I want a child, but alas we are barren.”
“I’ll light a candle for you,” he said.
Years later he saw her again, weeping. “What’s wrong? Did you not have a child?”
“We’ve had triplets every spring for the last five years! Now I’m stuck, alone, caring for fifteen children.”
“I’m sorry… Did your husband die?”
“No, he’s on a pilgrimage to the Vatican. To blow out your stupid candle!”
In feudal times, all of the land belonged to kings, and farmers belonged to the land. If you asked someone what “home” was they’d probably say the little village where they were sharecropping themselves to death, as their parents and grandparents had done before them. Ancestral bones were their “roots” in the land. And since serfdom didn’t come with dental insurance, most died of a tooth-ache at twenty-seven (just as their children were becoming mopey teenagers). For centuries, most folks never traveled more than two miles, and got buried a stone’s throw from where they’d been born and baptized.
Our idea of “owning” a “home” doesn’t really start until modernity. The sudden so-called discovery of the Americas had a lot to do with it – Europeans could go straight from debtor’s prison to having your own little plot of land on the American frontier. Early America needed pioneers to build log cabins on Native-American lands, face the brunt of tribal rage, and eventually populate and pollute an area enough that the Natives didn’t feel ‘at home’ there anymore.
Then there was a brief blip of what’s sometimes called “the American Dream,” where factory-workers and teachers could afford to buy houses and take summer vacation to national landmark tourist-traps. It’s a “Dream” in that it seems eternal, but now we know that it was just a bizarre fad, a trend that lasted a generation or two. Vine Deloria, a descendant of migratory Native Americans, looked at the American middle class in the late nineteen seventies, and saw wandering, foraging nomads. He wrote, “Today the land is dotted with towns, cities, suburbs, and the like. Yet very few of these political subdivisions are in fact communities. They are rather transitory locations for the temporary existence of wage earners. People come and go as the economics of the situation demand.” (God Is Red, p. 214)
I can relate to this, having lived in fifteen towns, in seven states. Seven of these locations are in New York, my favorite state, where I was born and hope to spend the rest of my days. I’ve lived in a cattle-town, a small city, a couple crumbling ghettos and even the Big Apple itself. We’d left Manhattan for North Carolina because of employment and economics, but moved to Buffalo by choice – we decided we wanted to be here, and then worked out the employment and economics afterward. Arriving seven years ago, even though I’d barely seen Buffalo before, it still felt like coming home. And just the other day I realized, the house we live in now, I’ve lived in longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life.
Last month we took the kids to New Mexico, dragged them through the desert in summer heat, and then got home and realized we should have gone there in winter. Live and learn. But getting back reminded us of how exciting Western New York is. This would be a perfect place to take a vacation!
And that’s great, because after all that travel, I need a vacation.
misterjsnodgrass 