-Time at St. James, by the Madison Clock Company, 1847, on the wall at St. James United Methodist Church, Augusta, Georgia, June 6th, 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Home Haiku
the thing about home
home hangs its weathered straw hat
on what used to be you
After we circled twice, the landing gear whirred and dropped with a thunk. I saw the top of Minneapolis clearly from the air. Hot, humid haze. I could not feel it. Liz said it rained and rained while I was gone. And then summer came.
I slept most of the flight, Northwest 150 from Baltimore. There was an empty seat between me and the 82-year-old man from a place 47 miles west of the Black Hills of South Dakota.
He asked me where I was going. I pointed down and said, “Here.” He asked what I did. I said, “I’m a writer.”
“What?” he said, cupping his right ear. “I’m a writer,” I repeated, a little more loudly.
He said, “I’ve written two books. I started a boarding school in South Dakota many years ago. The first book’s about that. The second is about, uhh, my family and my kids. My wife and I have held each other together for 56 years.”
“That’s a long time,” I said.
The man had cauliflower ears, a wide-brimmed straw hat, round Buddha belly that rolled over his belt, faded jeans with one of those western buckles, big-framed glasses, navy T-shirt, and a large, beige hearing aid. I smiled at him when I could muster it. But mostly I stared at the diminishing feet between me and the ground.
My mind rambled over the last few weeks. Then we landed.
Liz threw me the biggest kiss when she scooped me up at baggage. She’s glad I’m home. I’m glad to be home. And there is a sadness about it, too. All the connections I made, the bridges I walked.
Doors have opened to me, people from the past who remember who I was. Now I find myself missing them.
Twenty, thirty, forty years. There are not many people left who knew the girl I used to be.
Which home is home?
The answer to the riddle: every home is home.
For the time that it is home.
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
“There are not many people left who knew the girl I used to be.”
This is one of the most powerful lines I have ever read: it carries a bittersweet sadness while also expressing how far you’ve come.
It’s also a really strong statement about the cycle of life.
Wow.
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This reminds me of when I was young and would either come home from vacation at my cousins’ house in California or my cousins would leave after a long vacation with us in NM, that feeling of missing them and missing family. It’s good to be with people who’ve known you before you even knew you.
I’m sure we didn’t even get to experience the half of it, but being able to hear about what you were finding and how you were feeling – it was something I’d not been a part of, and it highlighted for me what really makes blogging the phenomenon it is today. Voyeur to one’s life. Thanks for sharing that.
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I’m with Shawn on that line. Seems to me you’ve churned out at least two great opening lines for a memoir during your trip.
I fly alot and have met interesting as well as tedious people in the seat next to me. When I flew from Indianapolis to La Guardia in May, I sat next to a woman who turned out to be a member of Generation Three of the Lilly Family — the Family that gives all that money to art museums and NPR, etc. She couldn’t have been more down-to-earth.
Anyhoo, glad that you are home safe and sound. I was in my car early yesterday evening when a huge thunderstorm hit the area, coming from the direction Baltimore, so I wondered if your flight had been delayed.
QUESTION: In the photo, “Make Time for . . . ” — since the image was taken in a church, I’m assuming we’re to make time for God or Jesus? I love that you want viewers to fill in the blank.
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That line is connected to the way I feel when I visit with family and friends from the past. It’s like I am connecting from two levels simultaneously – the younger person who knew them at the age when I spent all that time with them. And the older person who is connecting with them now.
My 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Juarez, said something similar to it when my brother and I visited with her the day before I left. I can’t remember exactly what she said (we spent a few hours there) but maybe it stuck with me. I’ll have to ask my brother or listen to the tape of her voice. I am sure I will be writing about her. She’s one of the reasons I am a writer.
I’m so glad I got to tape people’s voices. It feels like a great gift to have photographs and taped voices. Memory is so connected to audio and visual, as well as smells.
I still feel a sense of sadness this morning. I miss all these people like ybonesy said about her summer visits. Yet I am glad to be home.
I think there is a sadness you visit when you write about the past. Maybe it’s the sadness of growing older. And like Shawn said, the cycle of life.
Birth, death, and rebirth.
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Sharonimo, when you mentioned the Lilly family, I thought you might mean the Lilly-Tulip Cup Company. One of their plants was built in Augusta, Georgia in 1947 and my grandmother worked there for years. But you also may mean Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company. Which was she heir to? Lilly Cup has a long history in Augusta.
About your QUESTION – the clock was on a huge white wall in the basement where the church now provides the homeless with a place to stay. And the full phrasing is “Make Time for Prayer.” I cropped it because I wanted people to be more able to see the “Madison Clock Company, 1847” on the clock face. St. James is one of the oldest churches in Augusta.
The demographics of the this area of Augusta have changed dramatically since my mother and uncle went to church at St. James. When we stopped by that day, there just happened to be a woman there who knew the history of the church. She knew about my family and actually went to school with one of my aunts. She gave us a tour and I got a lot of photographs.
These were the kind of synchronicities that kept happening on this whole trip. So many open doors.
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I’m happy to know the end of the sentence…Make Time for Prayer. I wonder if that was painted on the wall when the church was built, or added later. Before I knew how the sentence ended, I tried to guess what people in the mid-1800’s would have needed reminding about. I wouldn’t have guessed prayer.
Your haiku makes that “jump” Natalie Goldberg talks about. I can feel that wide space you’ve created within the poem.
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That’s a good question. I didn’t ask if “Make Time for Prayer” was painted on the wall recently or if it was old. But I know I was drawn to that section of wall.
The room we were standing in was on the lower floor. It had windows and heavy wooden walls that rolled up into the ceiling (like 1800’s library doors rolled into the wall). The woman said they used to have Sunday School in that room. But these days, they roll down the partitions to make dividers for the homeless who sleep there.
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QM,
One of the things your journey and the visit to Mrs. Juarez emblazoned on my psyche is that we live and remember “in context” (I really want to say out of context but that denies the possibility of changing a memory.) In wandering the synaptic streets of our memories, I have watched my memories morph onto a clearer picture of the experiences of my life.
Once you step outside of the memory and see it from another’s perspective with the nuances they offer and the personal trials they were experiencing, your memory of the event becomes clearer and more focused. The memory changes and becomes more dimensional.
Mrs. Juarez summed this up when she said “When my aunts died I realized that there was no one who remembers me anymore.” All the memories of her current loved ones do not include her childhood and family. Unfortunately for Mrs. Juarez, most of those memories have now become static, unless she can recapture the moments from pictures long forgotten.
R3
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R3, Thanks for helping me remember the line from Mrs. Juarez I was trying to capture:
“When my aunts died I realized that there was no one who remembers me anymore.”
She was very elegant when she said this and there was a sadness in her eyes. You are right – there is no one to help her remember.
I am fortunate to have gone back and asked the questions of those whose memories can augment my own. It felt like these generous people were filling in the gaps to my story from their own perspective.
I like what you said here:
Once you step outside of the memory and see it from another’s perspective with the nuances they offer and the personal trials they were experiencing, your memory of the event becomes clearer and more focused. The memory changes and becomes more dimensional.
Thanks for being a witness to my journey.
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