The Push and the Pull

1992.  I was sitting on the kitchen steps to William Faulkner's house in Oxford, Mississippi, no one home but me and Jordy.  We'd snuck onto the grounds after the caretakers had locked up. The Ole Miss marching band was rehearsing somewhere beyond the trees.  The sky was low and heavy, still very humid in mid-September.  I was awash in emotion, mostly sad.  "What is it?" Jordy asked, seeming unsure whether I wanted comfort or to be left alone.  I tried to explain, knowing how crazy I sounded.  I had fallen in love with this place but knew it would end, and was mourning it already.  Without questioning my logic, Jordy replied kindly, "But maybe it won't."

Places do this to me.  I fall for them, the same cascade of feeling, surrender, irrational sense of inevitability usually reserved for love between humans.

When I was 14, my mother invited a Japanese college student for a study-abroad home-stay.  Naoko was entirely alien to me -- her language, both verbal and body, her fashion, her neatly arranged toiletries.  Yet before her three weeks were up, I felt an inexorable pull to go to Japan.  I was falling. Six years later, in my muchachuka Japanese, I gave a toast at Naoko's wedding in Osaka.

When I landed in Los Angeles for film school, my neighbor, Melodee, a divorced former actress now commercial real estate agent, illuminated it all (after a pitcher of Cosmopolitans).  I had to return to Japan because I'd been a geisha in a previous life, and I had probably committed suicide.  I was pulled there to make peace, to mend, my broken past.  Only in LA!  (I nursed quite a hangover that first day of film school orientation!)

Jordy was right -- I've never stopped loving any place I truly loved, but I have felt the instinct that it's time to move on, often when some other place has pulled me.  In the rare instance when I left a place before I was ready -- Mississippi, left it for what I thought was love of a person -- I regretted it, and resented whatever place received me after (San Francisco).  Los Angeles was a surprise, the first pragmatic move (in-state tuition for graduate school) undertaken with the double prejudice people from the Bay Area and New England hold against that city.  But soon my tolerance for LA blossomed into a proper love affair, endless strip malls and all.

But New York was calling...  During the Tribeca Film Festival,  Jordy, baby Duncan and I climbed to the roof of the West Village apartment we'd rented through Craigslist (later, oddly, Craig himself would award my film a prize, so funny) with my little brother Richard and his girlfriend, Breanna.  It was sunset, springtime in New York, layers of quaint village buildings and water towers rising toward shiny Midtown.  A pair of wispy clouds bracketed the sky like wings, pink in the afterglow, and I was awash with the feeling that we should move to New York, and if we did, New York would look after us.  I smiled to imagine my grandfathers, New Yorkers both, somehow engineering the sunset to deliver this message.

Most people wouldn't make transcontinental moves based on such a moment.  Of course, there were many other more reasonable factors.  But once the decision to move was taken, Brooklyn didn't "speak" to me -- it shouted.  There I discovered an entire borough of people like me - scavengers of the broken pieces of a tired world, having fun seeing what new things we can make of them.  (I was a kid who dragged trash from the dumpster of our condominium complex into a dwelling in the woods, appointed with discarded chairs, plants, newspapers, dishes...)

So, what are my broken pieces?  How did they get broken?  And what can I make of them?

Admission:  I've just finished Kate Atkinson's extraordinary novel, Life After Life, in which her heroine, Ursula, is born and dies again and again, until she "gets it right."  I am mesmerized by Atkinson's construct and still much too involved in her characters to let them be fictional, subject to sudden bouts of weepiness both sad and grateful, etc.  Long ago I wrote a blog entry here called "A Pseudo-metaphysics of Birth" in which I toyed with some of these ideas.  (Was my cold clarity that Jordy must leave the house when he contracted Swine flu in my eighth month of pregnancy with Tucker callousness on my part, hysteria from all the warnings to pregnant women, or a flashback to my great-grandmother's own swift death in New York City in 1919 from Spanish flu?  In any case, Jordy recovered more quickly for being relieved of parenting duties, and Tucker was born with a surplus of good health.  We are traveling the fork of history we all wished for.)

But, really, who knows how anything works?  Maybe not a geisha and suicide, but I did bring back something of Japan, or found something of myself there, that travels with me now forever, as does Mississippi.  We are very attached to the idea of our autonomous identities in American culture; we revere people who are "true to themselves," "authentic" and so forth and so on.  Yet we are so shaped by our family, our culture, our moment in history.  Without evoking reincarnation fantasies, it's pretty clear that a person's sense of self will be radically different if raised in rural China or adopted to a Brooklyn family.  Do the people make the place, or the place make the people?  (Or, of course, both?)  Are some people (gee, who?) more impressionable to place than others?  (One of my best friends responded, when I told her I was taking a part in a play this fall, "Of course you are!  You've always been a chameleon!"  It was said lovingly, though I felt ambivalent about the characterization.)

So why back to New Hampshire?   Why now?  We've got endless reasons, all of which sound pretty convincing (and have, as Jordy's Hungarian friend Robert would say, "the added benefit of truth"), but in the end it's an instinct.  We're supposed to come home now.  At least for a while.  To gather something?  Glean something?  Rest back in the source?  Make peace with the source?  Maybe, like Ursula returning to the day of her birth amidst a snow storm over and over again, being here gives me a chance to return to some of the forks in my life and walk a different way, if ever so slightly, or just walk it again and discover it's still -- and maybe has always been -- there.  The other day I was wading in the stream that wraps around our house, and time collapsed -- I was eight, wading in the stream behind Brook Hollow, content among the trees and dandelions tumbling down the white water, whole in some way that felt lost. Earlier this summer, our determined little Reeve leapt into the pool, forgetting his goggles, and groped with terror in the blurry water without finding the ledge of the underwater bench. Time collapsed and I was the one, four years old, having lost my grip on the steady silver rail of a motel pool and groping in watery oblivion for what felt like forever.  I lept after Reeve, leading him to the bench and reassuring him.  When I drive the back roads home from Cornish Elementary, I catch my breath at the view of the Green Mountains, instantly in my mother's car returning from a piano lesson, Susan Stamberg on the radio, greeted by this same view 32 years ago.  This summer the kids entered the Cornish Fair; in the spring Jordy and I hope to make maple syrup with them.  Yesterday I picked up my husband and son, passing the time while waiting for their ride with an acorn battle in front of the post office where, at the eleventh hour (literally) on May 1, 1987, I switched my "Yes" from a familiar East Coast college to one in California, off the map of my cozy, familiar world, and threw the envelope in the mailbox before fear could change my mind.  I leaned on the hood of the car that night, alone in the dark, trembling for minutes before I was fit to drive again.  But here I am again, picking up Jordy and our three-year old, who just demolished a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

Tiny loops of time folding back on themselves, carried by gently clicking knitting needles working out some pattern I only glimpse but can't quite yet make out.

Twenty-six years ago I ran to the big wide world that beckoned me.  But I also ran away because, though I had no idea at the time, my heart had been broken here in ways I couldn't grasp until I started to gather the pieces in far flung places.  It feels like an undeserved blessing to get to come home, and to realize that of all places, I love this one the most.