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What follows is a
work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your
own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get.
Oh: This could go on for a while.
March 1982
I thought of Shannon often, actually--more often than I should have, more often than what was fair to Kathy. Our relationship did not end with grace, and for years afterward we both had to live with a certain amount of ugliness and misery.
But for some time, we where happy. "We need to go to Hawaii," Shannon said one morning not long after we moved into her father's rental house.
"We do?" I said. "Why?"
"I like the beach. And the sun." She was still in college then, still not sure that she wanted to be a teacher but moving in that direction anyway.
"I'm not much for the beach," I said. "I kind of stand out in a swimsuit."
"You'll enjoy it. Daddy told me he'd buy me the trip as a graduation present."
"But you haven't graduated yet."
"One more semester--that's close enough. Don't you want to travel?"
"I like London."
"Is there a beach there?"
"Not that I know of. There's a river."
"Is there sun?"
"There can be. It's not as bleak as some people think. Besides, your dad said he'd pay for you--how will I get there?"
"He'll pay for both of us."
"He said that?"
She pressed her top teeth into her bottom lip. "Well, not yet. But he will!"
I knew that she was probably right about that, too--Howard had two daughters, and he doted on them so much that I thought he didn't recognize how they manipulated him. Marilynn, Shannon's mother, rolled her eyes and sighed every time the daughters found a way to get something from Howard, but nothing seemed to change in the years I knew them.
So, we went to Maui. Shannon found a small house a short uphill walk from the beach, and we spent a week eating mangoes, swimming in the ocean, and lying in the sun.
"See, this isn't so bad," she said to me one afternoon as we lay on large towels spread over the sand.
She glistened in the sun. Sweat and a thin layer of oil on her skin were bright and beckoning, and as I tilted my head to look at her I felt like a moth attracted to a light. "No, it's not so bad," I said.
Three really is enough, so this is the last of installment about my journey to the Midwest. Just as I've run out of reasons to go there, I think I've run out of things to say about it.
There were dreamers everywhere. I could tell by the way they were dressed, by the way they walked. They were natives of that city element, to steal and corrupt a line from Marge Piercy's poem "To Be of Use." The streets were full of them, and full of Uber drivers, too: anonymous owners of automobiles connected to anonymous people who needed rides. It's the Internet of Things, you know: that collection of whims marketed as necessities. You want to have your drapes open automatically every morning? There's an app for that.
I walked as much as I could while in Chicago, venturing into a few places I'd not been to before. That's how you get to know a place--on your feet, your legs all the Uber you need to become intimate with even the city of the broadest of shoulders. That's how I learned all that I did about London and San Francisco and Portland and Reno, too, sometimes choosing a route by which way I could cross a street, which building I spotted in the distance.
But, still, I don't know Chicago, only the general grid, only the diagonal streets that delineate paths Native Americans traveled for a long time before Daniel Burnham master-planned the city. What don't I know about Chicago? So many things: what happens at night; where the locals actually spend their time; which areas to avoid for any reason you can think of.
I've been home for just over a week now, and each day since I've wished my stay had been longer. And I'd like to think that I'll return soon, that circumstances, chance, or planning will get me there. Maybe I don't need a reason to go, after all.
A decade ago I started writing a poem entitled "Last Time Home." It was, I think written after a visit to my hometown and stemming from the idea that, finally, I would leave the place behind. This is the first stanza:
When we were ten we believed the myth of trains derailed
by a single penny. And we believed the myth of a boy
floating face up in the frozen pond until the men one morning
cut through the ice and pulled him free. We believed
in manhood and fighting a good fight, in developing biceps.
And most of us believed in Nixon.
Then there is some sentimental gibberish in the middle, and the ending goes like this:
To those who are buried here, I leave everything.
I even leave you Nixon.
The poem was never completed as far as I can tell, though I've got 10 drafts on my computer. And looking at it now, what I'd written was not very good. That sentiment, though, does linger, and the longer I'm in the Midwest, the stronger it grows: the inability to separate from a part of the country that has not been mine for a long time.
Perhaps we carry a sense of place with us. Or, perhaps those of us who aren't quite content do, and we remain unhealthily attached to the past--and that is why a poem like "Last Time Home" cannot truly be finished or written well.
This is my fifth and final night in Chicago: the end of 2015, the beginning of 2016. There were, perhaps, no good reasons for coming here alone, and alone again, but circumstances and mindsets dictated action, and this is where I ended up.
Then again, perhaps there don't have to be any good reasons, just reasons. That, I suppose, would cancel any binary labels such as "good" and "bad." Maybe that's Buddhist, but I don't know since I'm ignorant of most faith and belief systems. Regardless, I'm here.
The first full day in Illinois, the final day of 2015, I woke up early after a late arrival and a short night and walked to the train station. From there I rode to my hometown, a place I left decades ago but every so often find myself returning to. The weather was cold. Snow fell as I walked through barely light Chicago, boarded a train, and traveled back in both time and place to my hometown 60 miles away. Each stop along the way was a memory of places where relatives had lived, including the town where my father grew up after my grandfather moved his family up from Kentucky. Through the window and the snow I could see the house my father had lived in, where I had spend many days myself. That, perhaps, was the hardest stop along the line, and I was tempted to disembark and spend time there again. My father would have been 82 now, and I wonder what he would have thought had he been able to walk around that neighborhood again. Would he, like me, be wary of the fine line between nostalgia and mortality, between nostalgia and depression?
When the train stopped in my hometown, I got off the train and started to the downtown square, a place I'd walked so many times before. The snow had let up, but the air bit into my bare skin so sharply that my eyes watered. Like a bird, I circled around and before heading toward the house in which I had grown up. The walk was familiar and I could have done it had I been blind: the streets where my paper route had been; the field my friends and I had played in; the schools I had attended. It did feel strange: a sense of being home coupled with a sense of being an outsider. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the house and shut my eyes and let myself barely cross that line between nostalgia and depression, then regrouped and retraced my route back downtown.
Stopping for lunch in a small restaurant, I looked at everyone who was old and wondered if I had known them or their children. After more wandering, I boarded the train back to Chicago.
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