Returning home after an absence is a little like wandering around the museum of your life. I'm reminded of elderly Rose in James Cameron's boat soap opera [i]Titanic[/i], looking at what are mere artifacts for the salvage team with the wonder of someone who's just found a thick book of old and forgotten photographs.
While drying breakfast dishes, I spy a wicker basket hanging on the wall. In the weave of that basket are a hundred interconnected memories related to my mother's garlic bread. She probably hasn't made it in years, but the sight of the basket fires a charge into whatever brain cell holds those little pieces of memory - the bread itself (an Italian loaf, quartered lengthways, buttered, oreganoed, a little garlic salt, broiled until the top browned and bubbled), the use of a clean linen towel in the basket instead of foil (no idea why - that's just how it was done); and this branches into the minutae of the kitchen itself, from the cooking utensils used on the ground beef for spaghetti sauce to the pattern of the silverware I set on the table.
Remembering all of those strange little bits of detail feels like stretching after sitting in an airplane seat from DC to LA.
It happens often. The narrow yellow cabinet in the garage that used to stand in my grandmother's garage in Jefferson Heights, with the concrete slab and the twitchy garage door opener; the old umbrella stand; the cast iron doorstop shaped like a flower bouquet (now in my sister's house) - on and on, each one a different rabbit hole and a different wonderland.
I haven't thought of many of these things in decades, and in a way it's interesting to find them locked away inside. The writer in me I glad for the detail and texture, but the kid in me marvels at the clarity of these things. It is very much like home isn't so much a place to go, but a thing we carry around, ready to return to us upon summons when we need the warm glow of familiarity, that brief burst of where we came from.
Maybe Dr. Emilio Lizardo was right. "Home is where you hang your hat."
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A note on process: I'm composing and post solely via iPhone this weekend, which makes typo spotting doubly hard. Frankly, I'm amazed I can make this little keyboard dance as well as I am. But I own any weird substitutions the program makes (it wanted to change something to Tobias earlier) and will strive to improve my mobile game. Now, could someone at Apple put the backspace key somewhere beside next to the 'M'?
2 comments:
thank you for evoking thoughts of happier times in my youth, spent with your family. noone has ever made me feel more welcome anywhere in my life than your mother, except perhaps your sister :)
i love you all bunches and am grateful always that y'all accepted me as is.....
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