Old Home Month
Finding Home in Places and People
The past month or so has taken me home. You’ll know from previous publications that home—literal or figurative—is one of my favorite topics to explore. In many ways, I wrote an entire book about finding home in places, people, and experiences.
This past month is no different. My 30th reunion at my Episcopal high school in Virginia took me to an unrecognizable school building. A space that was once nothing, just a side yard towering over a soccer field, is now a three-story atrium, a student lounge on steroids where alumni from all classes going back 50 years or more mingled and celebrated their time together. But the faces from the class of ‘96, going all the way back to seventh grade when I started going to this school, I would spot anywhere. We are essentially the same personalities. At a function just for our class, I turned the evening into an impromptu book signing. In those pages is a hybrid story about that school and its teachers. Reminiscing about a class retreat in seventh grade, or talking about teachers who had an influence on us made the weekend come alive. We swapped numbers and promised to stay in touch, just as we had at summer camp (minus the numbers). We even figured out how to share contacts by bumping the tops of our iPhones together. Magic! Our seventh grade selves wouldn’t know what to think.
Just last week, our younger niece graduated from Penn State. In addition to family time, we stayed with my former camp counselor, Ellen, from my Episcopal camp in North Carolina and her family. Ellen, still in teaching mode after all these years, taught us Cribbage. My brain still hurts. It’s amazing to be in touch after our lives have changed so much in the intervening years. But Cribbage? That was a low blow.
We then stayed with my college advisor from Sewanee, Cassie, and her partner Michael. Memory Lane on overdrive. I’ve known Cassie her entire teaching career; she’s known me since I was a 18 or 19. We laughed hard as we reminisced about the tiny town in Tennessee that brought us together. And while we managed a conversation about baroque and rococo, we mostly swapped tales of GERD.
The camp in question and our previous visit to Penn State comprise two different essays in my book, “Getting Away From It All” and “Range Anxiety.” They are about the people who comprise home. And as I continue to think about these places layered over each other, I summon the definition of nostalgia, which means homesickness.
As for the graduation itself, and after a long afternoon of pomp and circumstance (who brings airhorns to an indoor arena?), we took our nieces and the graduate’s boyfriend to a gay bar to continue the celebrations. (Don’t worry, it was so tame they weren’t even playing music.) The bar itself was made of old Scrabble tiles spelling various words and phrases, many of which I will not recount here. Right in front of me was the word Tennessee. I was sitting with our older niece who had gone to UTK for college. The two of us were thrilled by this uncanny call to our own alma maters. Country roads take me home.
This trip to State College was so immersive that I wasn’t chained to my phone or hooked to the news from the outside world. I barely took any photos, which is rare for me. I missed texts from a friend. “I figured that’s where you were,” she said, after my humble apology. It felt good to be so immersed in this time with friends going back to the ‘80s and ‘90s and with our family members with whom we always have a blast (even at a sedate gay bar).
Even more recently but more surprisingly for this essay, I had a benign mole removed by a fairly new dermatologist (new to me that is; she’s been practicing for decades). She reminds me of the actress Cherry Jones (Transparent; Hacks) mostly for her mellifluous Southern accent. As she performed her task (the details of which I will spare my readers), she chatted with me, kept my mind occupied. When she joked about my showing up so early for my appointment, it came about that I had been in a choir. Early is on time, on time is late. She asked which one, I said Sewanee. She had been accepted there, and while she ended up going to Duke (I didn’t protest given my precarious situation quite literally under her thumb), it turns out she had been to Spring Party Weekend in 1970. She told me, “They had purple grain alcohol punch.”
I laughed as carefully as I could to keep my shoulder and back in place. Purple and white are Sewanee’s colors. My parents were students at Sewanee at that time. There is no way they don’t know some of the same people, some of them probably in the very choir that taught me compulsive punctuality.
“Of course they did,” I muttered, my face pressed into the paper on the surgical table. We then chatted about various Episcopal churches we know in Atlanta. The same Episcopal church that ran my summer camp, school, and college.
I was glad for the distraction.
Home, I realized yet again, will find you anywhere.
How I love you, how I love you!