A, that I’m home. B, that I am not hopeless as a plant mommy; my plants all still cling to life, and the phaleonopsis is even blooming. C, they finished the deck while I was gone, and now I have a place to sit outside (and a mandate from the landlord to start planting things, if I so desire.)
The mourning doves are perplexed by the new addition. I can see one sitting on the new fence to my right, all puffed out so her head looks especially tiny. I’d been worried that the building of the deck would mean no more birds, but they peck around the edges, and I can hear them in the next-door yard, which is deeply overgrown and hospitable to their kind. I keep meaning to buy some seed for them, but my rental contract very firmly states that I am not to put out any food for creatures big or small, no sir no how. So I’m going to look into what sorts of flora I can get away with that will encourage the fauna to stay close.
I can’t begin to express how wonderful it is to be home. It’s been strange. I’d thought that these two weeks would be different from the two other sojourns I’ve made out of California since the new year, different because I wasn’t going home to watch my father die, different because I was going to be so preoccupied with writing and learning, different because I was going to a new place I’d never seen before that was supposed to just drip with Ye Olde New England Charme. And to some extent, that was true. Much of the Connecticut part of the trip was interesting, and the Boston bits were delightful. I got to see people I like, I met new people to like, and my last night at the O’Neill Center passed in a pleasurable haze of Corona and singing along with dozens of actors to a guy who could play every conceivable eighties tune on the piano.
But in one important sense it wasn’t different. Most of the time I was gone I really wanted to be home in San Francisco. I was so relieved when my plane hit tarmac last night. Some of that was seeing my peeps, of course. Snufkina picked me up at the airport in her little red car (the slash in the soft-top being large enough to allow windshield wiper fluid to fly through, as my freshly-polished forehead can attest) and drove me straight to a massive dollop of apricot and chocolate mousse in a hard chocolate egg-shaped shell. And then I let myself into AX’s, where I did my best impression of a cheesy Hollywood sex scene by strewing my clothing all through the hallway and the bedroom. This morning I sent e-mail to various people demanding that they see me as soon as possible, and tomorrow night I get to go to bellydance class and see all those tummylicious women I’ve been sweating next to for the past year.
I’ve been letting myself get closer to people in the past couple of years, a point I don’t tend to realize until I’m away. Can’t completely articulate what’s changed to make this possible, but I’m grateful. Grateful to have people in my life that I miss horribly when I’m away from them, instead of just shrugging and going back to my book.
But this isn’t all of it. The people are not all. Something else is changing, something too subtle for me to tease out, something beyond being amazed that I had to explain what a sex club was to someone in Boston and beyond wondering if I would be able to find a tribal/urban fusion-style bellydance teacher in Paris and beyond feeling like New York would swallow me whole. Something about feeling so keenly that San Francisco is my home that the thought of living anywhere else is anathema. I never felt this way about Detroit. When I was back there in the spring I couldn’t even summon up any feeling of native-ness. Once my mother moves out here, I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to Detroit. Minnesota ditto, unless I get maudlin and decide to hit a college reunion.
I think, while my monkey mind was following other things, some part of me went and rooted. I am drawing sustenance from my city now, as my whining posts from Connecticut indicate; pull me too far away and I start gasping and choking. My leaves wither.
I thought I was more of a gypsy than this would indicate. I didn’t think I needed to be settled. But then, I didn’t think I needed other people too much either, and I was completely wrong about that.
There are still places I desperately want to go. And the list lengthens; in the doctor’s office this morning I was reading about how Tuvalu might be lost under the waves forever within the next few decades, and my first thought was, I’d better go see it before that happens! Last night on the airplane, the in-flight magazine had a very well-written piece about going to see lava fields in Hawaii, and I thought, I have to go see lava! I’m incredibly suggestible that way. Say a place name, and I salivate. This is in addition to the places I need to visit because mom has dug up evidence of our having come from them: Beregszasz in what is now Ukraine being the obvious, Hungary and Russia the next on the list. I need to go back to Spain for the same reason, see if I can sniff out where my father’s people might have passed on their way to Russia, see if anyplace hits me with the same gentle punch of familiarity that Granada did in 1999. Ireland and Alsace-Lorraine for my grandmother. The camps for myself, when I’m ready; maybe not until I’m in my forties and feeling better prepared for it. And then the places I’ve been and loved without any genetic connection--France, Hong Kong, Japan--and all those places too beautiful or strange to miss.
Long list.
But no inclination to go and live anywhere else, although if somehow Kerry loses in November I may have to become an expatriate out of simple fear and disgust. And very little desire to go anywhere for longer than a month, although that could change. There might be another five-month odyssey in me somewhere that I’m not feeling stir yet. And the idea of being bi-coastal is sort of attractive.
Right now though, I’m not seeing it. It is so good to be home.
