No Home Like Home

 

Watering Hole, Philadelphia, August 2014

In case you haven't noticed, I travel a lot.

The first weekend in August, I was in Philadelphia teaching Miksang. A few weeks before that, on a three week retreat in Colorado. My wife gets tired of me traveling (that's the polite way of putting it). I get tired of me traveling (that's the simplistic way of putting it). And my cats? I think they don't notice so much, but they sure are happy when I get home.

As am I. I wish I could bring the cats and my wife along with me. I get jealous of dog owners, that they can carry along their dogs. I see them in carriers (well, little ones) on planes, out running in dog parks in other cities, and I wish the cats could just curl up and come along. I wish each place I am for between 4-21 days could become home for just a little bit.

It does, sort of. I figure out where to get the food I need. I take good care of myself: I practice, sleep, bring my own pillow, make sure my meds are in order. I get better and better at this over time. And yet, ironically, I also get older. It takes longer for me to adjust to time changes, more sleep for me to feel recovered. I get sick less often because I am more in touch with what I need - and I need more than I did when I was younger.

Nothing beats arrival - especially arriving home. Piles of mail, of dirty laundry, of dirty dishes, even, can't deter me from snuggling my wife and cats. Home is my watering hole, where I come back to again and again.

In my first chapbook of poetry, At Home Here, I implied I can be at home anywhere. Yes, and also, there is actually no place like home. No home like home.

Mysterious Productions

A couple of nights ago, I decided to drive by the house I grew up in. I was in the area, teaching the last of my Junior High creative writing program (through WCATY) and it was late - post-drink with a new friend, pre-hotel return. The times before back in the area are sometimes overloaded with emotion and I can't go anywhere near the north side of town. But this time, everything closed down but me, it was ok. I drifted along the streets, through blinking red lights, tracing the paths of 18 years of life, followed by a few mixed ones after - dating someone back in the home town, brother still living in parents' house after mom died - and it felt wonderfully stimulating (wish I could predict things like that! such good writing time) as opposed to traumatizing.

A block away I saw the for-sale sign on the house next door, then, as I got closer, yes, a for-sale at 1414, the house I grew up in. Without thinking, I took out my iPhone and entered the information for the realtor and sent it to myself, before I could judge anything. I knew I probably wouldn't call, that it, in fact, might be bad news to do so, but I did go back to see my grandmother's house years after she died, and it did resolve at least this feeling like her old place wasn't haunting me anymore.

When I am ready, it will be good to call on the new owners, whomever they are at that point, and walk through this house where I grew up. It had already changed around a lot before my brother sold it - totally re-done interior: wood floor where the green matted carpets used to be, exposed brick where plaster used to crack. Then, all of a sudden, it was sold.

Last night I had a dream along the lines of two kinds of dreams I've had about that house for many years. The first sort (not what I had last night) is more of a waking dream - lucid, lyrical - in which I think of "home" and what comes to mind is not the house I have owned for nearly 6 years, but *that* home, my childhood home. The two lay over each other in a strange, very dream-like way, sometimes as I sleep and often as I am awake. But what happened last night was the second sort - I dream of the house, of living in it, visiting it, and it is wholly different than could even physically happen. Once I dreamt a woman had turned it into a ballroom dancehall kind of place (the ceilings are stuck at a firm four-square frame house height of ten feet) and last night, that some incredibly hip and lovely loft-building couple had turned it into a place of total light and sparkly corners, completely altering it to its core. It was hard for me, in the dream, to be both happy for it and also sad to have lost the simple place I recall - often, now, in memory exercises where I make maps and lists of what was in every room. They told me they were trying to sell it for a million (Why would you fix it to your desires then sell it? I asked, and they had no reply) which wouldn't work for the location in my hometown the house is in.

But I loved it this way, too. I tried to take ideas and think of bringing them back here, to the home I actually own, the one I am in right now, writing. I couldn't shake this desire to buy that house - that new version of the old house - in toto. Maybe I wanted to freeze it from changing, or maybe I just loved that it was new and old, even as it was hard for me. I told them about my childhood neighbors and what I knew of the history of the neighborhood. They were delighted but also not committed to staying there.

Like me. You couldn't get me to move back there, not to that house, or that town. I don't hate it or find it a bad place - I think it's quite a good place, actually - but it's not my home. Madison is my home. Right?

I called Dylan and mentioned the For Sale sign, debated whether I would call the next day, whether I should tell the truth (I used to live here, saw it was for sale, and wanted to look but am not looking to buy it) or fake it. I don't think I could have faked it, and Dylan agreed, but also warned me that the truth might not get me in - it might with a current owner, but not with a realtor.

I didn't call. In the end, it was too messy emotionally and I was too tired. Instead, I went to Horicon Marsh on my way home, one of my favorite places on this whole earth. I found a new place to enter in and drove along a quiet road, listening to peepers and barking geese. Finding "home" out in the middle of the marsh, looking out over the flattened cattails and sharp blue waters really re-centered me in a way I am certain going to 1414 wouldn't have done. And by the time I did get *home* much later last night, I knew I was where I am supposed to be.

Waking this morning after the confusing dream, I fell into a fog for an hour or so. Where am I? What do I need? What is home? I opened up the images I took at Horicon - the place my subconscious directed me in the middle of my meanderings - and felt re-honed, re-centered, at home.

Wisconsin. Yes, both that home and this home - 1414 and Madison - are home. Horicon is also home. I am home all the time. I carry me with me all the time. The dream is the truth, and right now typing in bed is also truth - a much bigger truth than the stories of where, when - a truth that is also much simpler.

I am home for me, and all of my memories are fodder to keep the homefires burning, as are fantasies and now-moment realities. All my mysterious productions - plays on words, dramas of the mind - all of them point to the same thing, not contradicting things. I just had to back off enough to see what they were all pointing to in their chaos. Many thanks to Horicon for bringing that truth home to me.

Going Home?

I dream often of a mixed-together Madison-Appleton. In the dream I am thinking of going home, to the house I have owned in Madison for 6.5 years now, and accidentally, the house I grew up in pops into mind, still as was last I saw the inside of it over 12 years ago. They become one and I can't tell where I am. Bedrooms swap with each other so the home in my dream is a mix of both, and sometimes that becomes lucid dreaming - so lucid even when I am awake I feel as if I never left the dream.

Often it is very painful for me to go to Appleton. I've managed to go home (see, I said it, though I meant to write "there") almost annually for my nephew's birthday party in August, going the long way around on 441 so I don't have to tread too familiar territory from "back then." But of course he and his mother live perilously close to the complex where the first boy I kissed and a few friends after inhabited, the street name for my nephew's house even the same as a costume the boy was wearing when I met the ex-boyfriend.

The only time I can go into the city proper and not lose my shit is when I am shut down, turned off. I went back for a reading with Erika last August and since we went into just a new cafe - Harmony - I hadn't been in before because it's relatively new, and because Erika kept me busy by chatting with me and having her own reactions to going back (she's from the same area), I managed to get through ok. And I let that convince me that going back this time, while I was in the area teaching my online creative writing class to Junior High kids and meeting with them in person in Oshkosh (at the same tech college my dad finished his career out at before dying; though I never visited him at that building, luckily!), would be ok.

I knew a couple of days before it wasn't going to be ok. My guts got wobbly and my skin began to itch. My neck, which has been well-behaved lately because I have consciously worked on my stress and anxiety levels, ratcheted up into a totally frozen spasm. Even with the treat of meeting Helen Boyd on my schedule - she just happens to be living in Appleton at the moment! - I still knew it wasn't going to be pretty. I booked myself a hotel room in Fond du Lac (mis-estimating how far it is from Appleton - it was so much cheaper than Oshkosh, but not worth the extra drive!) with hot tub on premise and made the first leg of the drive just fine.

On the way to Sheboygan, my partner's hometown, we drive through Fond du Lac, so although Schreiner's Restaurant (intersection of 23/41 - Johnson St) is on my map of Fox Valley's loaded memories, I am used to it. But as soon as I began to head up past Oshkosh (pretty neutral place, which is why I took the gig - I don't see myself ever taking one in Appleton, though one of my students lives there and half of them go to school in Kimberly), the world started to get pretty weird.

It's a well-worn analog, but the best I can say is that it's a little like being on LSD, which I did a fair amount of in high school in that town. I saw the exit I used to take to my best friend's house (two exits, depending on if I were coming from north or south) and began to cry, quite spontaneously and with great misery. Everything that I saw, and often things I had forgotten about - AutoTrust on Oneida were I got my first Saab worked on after my mom died, the Walgreen's where Anne worked in High School, Between the Locks where we often had post-show food and drink - carried a whole world that would open up quickly, flash itself to me, then disappear.

It was an experience like this I had coming over the darkened N. Oneida bridge, catching myself peering high over my steering wheel for the Appleton "skyline" in which the two worlds - Madison, coming over John Nolen going North; Appleton, coming south over the Skyline Bridge crossing the Fox River - merged. The flash was like a living dream, two consciousnesses and a couple of subconsciousnesses, for good measure. I jerked the wheel without trying and then caught myself again and the tears came anew.

Once inside the cafe I was ok - I knew that would be the case and told myself as much as soon as the bridge bit passed. Even after that, going to Pat's Tap, a familiar place, I could handle myself ok. Heid's Music, Avenue Jewelry Shop - lots of the same places remained along that stretch, but I was settled in, returned to my skin, awake and out of the dream of then, thoroughly in the present with Helen.

My apologies to Appletonians whom I would quite like to see - this was an experimental visit and as you can see it was a bit tender, to say the least. Seeing a new face helped a lot; let's hope I can see old faces in the future and have that ground me, too.

I was exhausted come Friday afternoon, driving into the sunset (ugh) after teaching the kids in Oshkosh. But when I turned that last corner - avoiding the John Nolen Bridge, not needing a flashback - around Pug Mahones and into my driveway, I felt a relief and deep belief that the trip did help to settle a couple of things for sure - THIS is my home, even if that WAS, and in a certain sense, always will be; a first lover, the first kiss, those people don't ever stop being your firsts. But this is my home now. The cats and Dylan make sure I know that without a doubt, and I love them for it.

Big Exit

I'm back into order. The office, the kitchen, are fully functional. The structure of the school year has saved me from myself. And falling back into the forms, freedom comes. The freedom to consider what structures haven't worked before, why, how to re-form them, what to reject and what to accept.

Family. Family order and inheritance is in my head a lot lately. A very good friend is going through a mid-twenties reckoning, figuring out what her raising has done, how it has shaped her, affected her. What to accept, what to reject. Right now there seems a lot to reject: parents' manners, opinions, structures. Yet she can still feel the love, compassion, underneath. Is it an undertow or an inner connection? Karma or Samsara? I know this battle well. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater - that baby, floating in your family heritage, emotional, political, psychological - is YOU.

Or, here, Me. I dreamt last night that my family was seated like a council around a large table. They were plotting and planning, in deep undertones, like a warren of gangsters accustomed to the action, to murder and torture folks. Even in my dream mind, I could see that the content came from watching so much Angel lately with Dylan, but the intention came from a long conversation just after TV with the aforementioned friend. Violence - intentional or unintentional, psychological, sexual, emotional - haunts us, from the inside out. I felt this strange allegiance to the family - I couldn't just walk out, and not because they'd kill me - and yet, I knew I opposed what they were plotting.

I woke disoriented, concerned about the content, the plot of the dream. Ugh. Why so violent? Less Angel, more Barney, I guess. Then it hit me, steel beam on the head: duh, of course, I was combining our conversation with the data from Angel. How do you stay in your family and yet make your Big Exit, become who you "really" are, and, for that matter, as the friend and I were discussing, how do you actually HEAL your family's karma, wipe some of the slate free, make sure the Samsara buck stops as much as it can at YOU?

How intertwined we are. In order to see interdependence, just look at your family, so many teachers say. You want practice? Call your mother. ("Say hi to your mother for me, Miriam!" a friend said yesterday after we hung out. "Oops," he quickly stated, sheepish grin. "That's ok. Even I forget sometimes that she's dead.") Think about your childhood. Go "home" - to where you were raised, to your adolescence, and you'll have plenty of fodder.

Fodder. Crap and Compost. Fetid rich rot. Ready to fall Apart. Perfect ground for Growth. Exit yes, but you'll have to come back, compelled to do so, with or without resistance. And there you cannot help but heal, yourself and your family. May as well make the best of these return visits.