Returns

12.26.06


Today would be the first day of returning unwanted or broken gifts. It is also the day of returning to one’s home after vacation and I feel a huge sense of relief. Being 5 days without my usual routine, I am aware of how important some of the little things in life have become, ½ hour of daily practice, my morning tea in an old chair from Michigan, my dance class, sitting on the front porch after a long day looking up at the night sky. The weather in AR prohibited some of these things and not having my cello and other hobbies at hand was also a problem. But this is the first time traveling where I felt, I absolutely could not live here and that was strange. There’s always been a side of me that loves to imagine finding whatever I need where I am, in a strange city or country, sort of like a cosmic Where’s Waldo picture I might have landed in. A university town usually has a music deparment, therefore string instructors and dance teachers; good coffee shops and eclectic clubs, cultural offerings so I always think I could safely land in one of these. But this time, even in 2 such places, I could not. Perhaps it was the incessantly grey weather or the overwhelming sense of drowning in big box stores and franchise hell. Certainly the lack of alcohol didn’t help either. My husband’s family is dear, loving, welcoming and always happy to see us, so that wasn’t it either. The kids were happy to see cousins and to enjoy the holiday festivities. But I felt adrift.

The Phoenix airport had announcements in English & Spanish and I found myself pulled again, to this other place in my mind. And wonder why a language has such an effect. I use it daily at work with my office mate, Rocio, and listen to my evangelical station, Radio Nueva Vida, on all my commutes, so perhaps missing it for these few days was part of my dis-orientation. What’s strange is that it’s not even a part of my past in any big way, except for loving and studying so many languages in high school and college then spending time in Cuernevacas in college, living with a family, and of course having a crush on Abelardo Albaran, some teen I must have met at a bar or as part of an exchange program. Then, I never really used Spanish again until public health school working with Mexican Migrants on the Eastern shore of Maryland. It came back quickly but then got put away again until a few years ago when I came back to public health and my last job. Now I don’t get to use it as much as I would like, but am looking forward to starting my own class at Kaiser fairly soon.

So, what does this language lure mean? It used to be French, I used it in Zaire and then more recently at the French production company where I worked in Hollywood. Something about slipping out of one’s own idioma and into another makes you focus and what you really want to say or need to hear. There is also a different feel to these softer tongues, both in the mouth and to the ear. One shapes one’s mouth differently (is there anything sexier than a francophone’s pouty lips saying “tu peux faire ca pour moi?”). I can’t quite figure out what it is about spanish that equally speaks to me; perhaps it's more the vocablulary (lluvia de ideas for brainstorming) than the sound of it, but there is something a bit more mellow and soft than English and her germanic roots.

In coming back, returning, I feel comfort and also desire to keep moving. I was saying to someone how as we get older seem to have nostalgia for our roots, whence we came. I miss NY, her energy, I miss the Mediterranean, her soft sea swells. I miss the Caribbean, her sandy shores and the many marinas we moored at. I wonder if it's as much the places that I miss as the feelings I had in them. I no longer have a "home" that I can go back to, and having sold my half of the last vestige of my mother's memory, I don't know where to turn exactly for that sense of belonging. There is a feeling of it here, in LA, with my family, but something is missing, something elemental and elusive. I keep thinking Mexico, for some reason, having fallen in love with this mountain town in Guanajuato, but was it just a moment in time, feeling that familiar flutter afoot as I explored something new? Was it more the memory of being on my own, as a youth, ever searching, never finding that I am just so used to? Or did I feel a pull to a place that reminded me of both Greenwich Village, Prague and Marbella all at once?

Do we at middle age begin to question our past as we contemplate our future and yearn for the familiar while also craving the new, the challenges of the unknown? This photo of the cemetary we visited in Arkansas reminds me of the vastness that is both our past and our eternal future in death. We inch ever away from one and towards the other and along the way find our fellow traveling souls, equally on their search or standing on the sidelines watching. Do we return to the earth whence we came or do we dissipate into the grey skies overhead, only to rain down again on our ancestors and likely heirs?