You can't go home again.
How often have you heard that one?
I think there's some truth in it. But in my life, the idea that one "can't go home again" has been less a euphemism and more like a way of life.
I moved a lot when I was a kid. Born in a Florida college town, moved to Miami shortly thereafter. At 4, moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where I stayed until age 10. In those six years, we lived in five different homes in five completely different parts of town. My dad was an upwardly mobile architect, and we moved because of the houses themselves, not because of the people or activities going on in them. The first house was a Frank Lloyd Wright.
With all that moving, I never had neighborhood playmates for very long. I'd start making friends and have a summer and winter with them, maybe part of a fifth or even a sixth season, but never two years. I kept making friends and then moving away. It tore my heart out repeatedly. Start over again. Start over again.
The one constant thing was attending the same Catholic school. Unfortunately, I was a bit of a neurotic who didn't like to brush her hair (still don't -- and it looks GREAT), so I was pretty much the playground scapegoat and last kid picked for every team. (But I was also the dodge ball champion.) I had two friends (the black girl and the sickly boy) and a "half-friend" in a girl who lived near me during one of those summers and befriended me there but pretended not to know me at school. So staying put in the same school, while it may have prevented me from being a misfit beyond misfits today, was not all that.
In the Spring of my sixth grade year, we up and moved to Houston. There, I lived in the same house for six years, and it felt like FOREVER. I made some friends, but I moved away for college and only maintained a few of those friendships through college. The same can be said for my college years. I made friends, and then I moved away -- to California -- and did not do the best maintenance work.
California is where I started my life as I know it today. I was in one town for 14 months, another for six years. That second "pit stop" (I was planning to leave after about two years) turned out to be the backdrop for a period of immense personal growth, and I had to chill my heels for a few years to let me catch up with my life. My brother's death threw a radical wrench into my plans, and 10 years ago this month, I ran away -- no job and very little money in hand -- and started a new life in Oregon.
I had made so so so many friends there in California. And I moved away.
Having moved around so much, I have actually lived here in Oregon longer now than anywhere in my life. When I graduated a few weeks ago, the program listed my "hometown" as Portland. No other place seemed logical, and I have lived here the longest.
But just after graduation last month -- and it has taken this long for the dust to begin settling enough for me to write about it -- I made what I think was my first-ever real "trip home." I went not to the city of my birth in Florida, not to the homes of my upbringing in South Carolina and Texas. Nor did I go to any of my family homes. I didn't go to Hawaii, either. I went to that "second pit stop," a small agricultural town in California's Central Valley.
This is not a place I want to call home. Of all climates in which I have lived, it is the most intolerable. It is arid and dusty and HOT. It also has a social climate that felt constrictive to me -- sometimes, the religiously conservative political environment was more than I felt I could tolerate. For a refuses-to-be-closeted lesbian feminist who loves the Pacific Northwest RAIN for its life-bestowing properties and the always-green landscape it creates... there are many reasons NOT to live there.
The yellow hills that cover the landscape of the Central Valley most of the year could almost make me mad at times. The way the air and the view of the nearby mountains is diminished by smog and agricultural dust felt suffocating to me then -- and still does.
But there was that aforementioned "community" of friends there, which I enjoyed more than anywhere else in my life. I loved my friends. But I still left them. The environment, especially my work, had become untenable. I did not see other opportunities -- chose not to see some of them -- and left for greener pastures.
I've visited twice in the past 10 years, once just a few months after I left and once about three years ago when I stayed one night while passing through on my way to Sequoia National Park to scatter my brother's ashes. Otherwise, I have never visited as in a "returning," as in the way one revisits the scenes of past crimes to rediscover what one lost there. As in the way one attempts to go home again.
Although several friends have died or moved away, many remain. And It was in encountering them on my recent trip back -- a trip to celebrate Morrocco Molé's 50th birthday and to do some "research" on my book -- that I think I finally know where and *what* "home" is.
Home is a place where you can find your past and where your past can find you. It's a place where you can go to "hideout" but where someone unexpected can easily find you even when you're incognito. It's a place you think you know and find you don't anymore. Where the faces are mostly familiar, if changed by time and lifestyles, but where you find that familiarity sometimes creates a greater sense of mystery than anything else. Home is a place which can open some spaces within, close others and blast the heaviest of doors off the hinges of the psyche's forgotten vaults.
That may be dramatic license, but it's also my experience. At least, with this one home to which I returned.
Not since Lesha's death (if you recall the
Peloton Of My Past) have I encountered so many old friends in such a short period of time. This time, however, it was all in person.
Staying with my Gay Godfathers, Morocco Molé and Lucy Ricardo, I had a GREAT time. They started my visit on a most peculiar note by inviting a collection of friends over with whom I have NOT remained in contact over these many years. One of them was only the most ancillary of friends. One was an older woman who I looked up to in my late 20s and who, I was sad to see, is now suffering from Parkinson's Disease (although possessing no less a keen mind as I had respected in her). Another was an old friend who I could tell was suffering from depression. I could feel the energy being pulled out of me when she hugged me. (I am told I can find a way to block such energy drifts, and I'm looking forward to learning that.) ... So we all had a couple hours of pleasant enough conversation.
The next morning, bright and early, I had a visit with my former therapist of about four years. Our two-hour discussion and some of the notes she gave me started the tilt of my world toward Twilight Zone -- very early in the trip, I would say, and without the assistance of Ahuasco or other mild hallucinogens. Also a bit early in the morning.
After leaving her, I went to the old coffee house my friends used to (and still do) frequent. It had been renovated massively and was operating under a new name, but something about it was still the same. The old roaster was tucked back into a corner rather than taking center stage in the window. I ate there and called the phone number of a former coworker, a photographer, who had left a message with Morocco that she wanted to see me.
Drove over to see her and got a distinct "Twin Peaks" kind of feeling to things. She was talking like a David Lynch character. That's all I really want to say about it. Sweet woman, though, and it was lovely to see her again.
Afternoon, I went to see Shall Be Revered (as she demands to be called). Visited for a while, chatted about the band director and politics with the band boosters. Then I went downtown to find Morocco.
On the way there, I called Mountain Girl, thinking she might be in Australia but giving it a shot anyway. She surprised me by answering the phone. Yes, she was in town, and yes, she thought she could go to the mountains with me. I was THRILLED. There is no one I wanted to accompany me into Sequoia or elsewhere than Mountain Girl.
Had lunch with Morocco, and as we were walking back to the car, we passed the coffeehouse.
"What, you don't recognize your old friend?" came a voice from the shadows of an outdoor table. I squinted and saw her. Mountain Girl, hair still long and greying quite nicely. We make plans to go play putt-putt, and a few hours later, I pick up MG at her house and take her back to the Gay Godfathers, where we enjoy a smoke and a little drink and head out to play. Fun, if a bit ... warm ... to this Oregon girl.
The next day, Tuesday, Mountain Girl and I take our first of what turned out to be two trips to the sequoias. On the way up, she talks about how her life has changed in the past few years, things she likes about it, things she doesn't. She mentions in passing that her roommate and best friend, who I once dated for a few months in 1997, is working in a similar field to me and has seriously gotten into fitness and activities she never used to do. Nothing else much was said on the topic of her best friend, one of my former lovers.
We climbed up on top of Moro Rock, pictured here, and Mountain Girl persuaded me to climb over the railing and wander out further along the top, going down the nose a little.
I had an energetic "spinout" up there, walked about 20 yards and had to sit down to maintain my balance. Or so I believed anyway. Not really sure about that now. I am really susceptible to dramatic and high vistas, but I was experiencing here for the first time some distinct difference between my fear of heights and a peculiarly strong energy that seems associated with the rock. Mountain Girl continued walking out on the rock and just as she disappeared below the rock horizon, she turned to me and said, "Just so you know, the energy coming off this rock is really fucking with my body, too. Never be ashamed of where you stop."
Later, we went to find the grove of sequoias where I scattered my brother's ashes. We found it, hiked to a nearby collection of granite boulders, took some rest and had some snacks. I did some drawings there, took some pictures. And when Mountain Girl wandered off to go explore a fallen sequoia, I went back down to the grove and did a little ritual there, planting a giant sequoia seed in the center of the grove.
The next day, I visited with one of my closest buddies from the newspaper, God Eye. He's working for another metro paper in the region, and after having lunch with his family (his wife also a former co-worker and friend of mine from before they were married), God Eye submitted to an interview with me as part of my research for the book. He was incredibly forthright and helpful.
That night, Morocco and I went swimming at SBR's house, then returned to his house to watch a movie with the Gay Godfathers. Turns out Lucy Ricardo starred in the movie as a nasty but stylish and effeminate drug kingpin who gets murdered in the end. They did not tell me Lucy was in the film, and the lighting and sound was so poor that it took me a while to recognize him. Little faux pas on my part. Should recognize one of my dearest old friends in a movie when he's not wearing any disguises! (Thank goodness I hadn't been wearing my glasses. It was easier to recognize him once I put them on....)
Thursday, Mountain Girl and I head back up to the mountains, this time going to the Grant Grove and some other locations in Kings Canyon National Park. We spend some time together on her secret rock, from which we spy on visitors to the Grant Tree. The last time either of us visited this rock was the last day we hung out together before I moved away. I still remember what I told her then:
Fall in love sometime. She had replied, "I fall in love all the time."
This time, I chose the occasion of our visit to this spot to talk to her about a scene in my book and to tell her how much the times we hiked in the woods, snowshoed through the valleys, hung out on some rock somewhere in some season or other... about how through all of that with her, she had been my most notable teacher when it came to enjoying nature, my natural passion for it notwithstanding.
From you, MG, I learned that exquisite environments are best enjoyed with exquisite foods, I told her.
You pointed out that it is no more difficult to pack in a bottle of wine than a water bottle, no heavier to bring cambonzola cheese and apples than string cheese and apples.There were many other lessons from her, too, but that was the one I wanted to mention as we polished off the sandwiches I brought from the old coffeehouse.
As we're driving down the mountain, heading back to town, we talk again for a moment about MG's roommate. Let's call her Love For Passion (LFP), as is her nickname in certain circles. I mention something -- which I will not repeat here -- regarding LFP's amazing capacity for passionate sex, as I recall it. Mountain Girl says nothing in reply. I guess this is just the way we communicate about her best friend: One of us makes a comment, and the other says nothing.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I walked out on Love For Passion 11 years ago and never spoke another word to her, never saw her again. It's one of those moves I regretted almost instantly but didn't know how to undo. I was younger then, considerably less mature and outrageously frightened by the immensity of feeling I experienced with her. I ran away, and true to form, never went back.
I broke my own heart that time. Smashed it to smithereens.
I know MG saw some of the fallout from that, even though I tried to keep it to myself out of respect for her long friendship with Love For Passion. Maybe that's how we settled into this place of not responding to each other's comments about LFP. Who knows.
In any event, about an hour after I made my last comment about LFP's presence as a lover, I was driving back to MG's house, about to pull up in the driveway, when she says to me, "Oh, LFP's home. I know she'd really like to see you. You should get out and say hello."
What?! I was shocked.
I don't think she wants to see me, I stammered.
"Oh, I know she does," MG replied.
I got out of the car to wish MG goodbye. It being my last night in town, I didn't anticipate seeing her again and believed she would move to Australia before I ever returned to the Central Valley. I looked at her, thinking,
Well, this is goodbye, but saying nothing.
I was stalling, about to kick the tires, hemming and hawing, the lingering of reluctant parting keeping me put, when I see the screen door at the front of the house open and LFP quickly striding toward me before I could respond. She threw her arms out wide and embraced me with a kind-sounding "UCM!" on her lips.
Instantly, I was held in place by her magnificent energy. The clarity of her openness and the absence of discomfort was palpable. I felt welcomed. Deeply and truly welcomed.
How does this happen? I wondered.
"It's so wonderful to see you. Come in for a drink?" LFP asked.
Nah, I gotta go meet some folks, I said, thinking of SBR with whom I had plans to hang out and chat.
"Oh," LFP said.
All three of us stood quietly for a moment.
"So what have you been up to?" LFP asked.
I'm working as a therapist, I replied.
I just finished grad school. Graduated last week."Hey, I've got my MSW. I don't do therapy, but that's interesting we're in similar lines of work," LFP said.
Another moment of silence. Someone says something I don't recall.
I'm thinking; I'm feeling. Some kicking of dust beneath my feet. Sweating in the 100-degree heat. I think about the time, make a quick calculation about how disappointed SBR might be if I stand her up versus what I feel an overwhelming urge to do.
You know, I think I'll have that drink after all, I said.
When I slipped quietly into the front door at the Gay Godfather's at about 6:45 the next morning, I was greeted by Morocco, drinking coffee with a smirk on his face. "Ran into Love For Passion, did you?" he said. "Girl.... Did you have fun?"
Absolutely. I had an amazing time.I don't want to lead anyone astray. We didn't have sex. I was filthy and stinky from being in the woods all day, on my period and had a small cold sore. Hardly appetizing. Plus, LFP says she has sworn off "one night stands," and I simply don't do them.
And yet, something happened for me that night with Love For Passion. An opening, a re-awakening with the hint of personal discovery that I'm not inclined to write about for public consumption right now. But I was being honest with Morocco Molé: It was amazing.
In fact, the entire trip was amazing. Seeing my old friends, visiting my old hangouts, finding the grove where I scattered my brother's ashes, sitting on those various rocks with my mountain friend. What else could cap an experience like that than spending the evening with a former lover and feeling a chemistry between us that perhaps is stronger than it was before (in my experience)?
Well, there was the facial that Morocco gave me just a couple hours before I left town. It was the first facial I've ever had, and Morocco's touch was full of warmth. So much so that I started crying. I felt deeply affected, full of love and appreciation for all these characters: Morocco Molé, Lucy Ricardo, Mountain Girl, SBR, God Eye, my former therapist, the giant sequoias, Moro Rock, the old friends who came to Morocco's "meet and greet," even the David Lynch character, and of course the aptly named Love For Passion.
It was altogether more than I bargained for, more than I wanted or expected. And in the end, just what I needed.
Like a trip home ought to be.
