Homeward Unbound

I had a lot of fear about a recent trip to the city of big shoulders—my childhood home, a place where my father lay languishing in an assisted living facility, a place where my mom wanted me to return, to return to the basement of films made and left, of photos taken and forgotten in drawers, of heavy yearbooks waiting for their rightful owner who was on the lam from his karma.

As if.

Walking below a harvest moon I admitted to Andy that it wasn’t money or lack of compassion that had blocked my visit—it was fear.  The shrink who deals with everyone else’s feelings, I realized, was terrified to go home—home to ground zero of depression, denial, narcissism, false faces and family secrets; the place of long-festering fraternal hurts and resentments, wounds needing to heal with no map and no sutures at hand.

*

Hanging with my brother is like stepping into The Cooking Channel… Having traversed the endless subterranean tunnel at O’Hare International I emerged into the waiting car, my nephew DJing from the back-seat, listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and then suddenly I’m eating baby tomatoes in truffle oil.

But salad moments were fleeting and soon we worked together to hoist my dad in his wheel chair up the steps.  He nearly choked on his wine, my dad, my fast-fading father.

I helped him pee for the first time in my life.  He didn’t want to just go with the flow in his double depends.  And so we found ourselves in a love embrace as I eased him onto the toilet.

With his knickers in quite the knot, I called for Scotch tape and gerryrigged his diaper.  You might think it horrible, but the fear of the thing far overshadows the thing itself—it’s just like riding a diaper bike and parenting prepares you well for many an eventuality (this is one of the reasons I find so much to contemplate, and co-relate, in the childcare journey).

A fine red burgundy, pasta, and steaks to perfection, sitting around the table with my nephews, my sister-in-law, my brother, my mom and dad:  Lovely.

And then descent into the inky night, wheel chair heavy down the steps, the long drive down ever-changing yet eternal Lincoln Avenue, rolling ghostly through the land of Lincoln, a river Styx to Lincolnwood whose terminus turns out to be a well lighted lobby with cookies and brave cheer as the doors are being locked for the night… with us inside.

It was not nearly the antiseptic cuckoo’s nest I’d feared, but real enough.  My father’s roommate, Steve (always Steve, my middle name web of interwoven synchronicities), told me that he was the kid of a gangster and the daughter of an orthodox rabbi.  Steve was a man darning his socks in the night, sewing kit open on the bed.

My mom and I had to find our way out a door not the front door.

Driving through the tunnel of replenishing trees, significantly now grown-up in the wake of their Dutch elm disease fallen forefathers, I arrived into the night of my very own childhood room, to dreams of venomous spiders and eight-bridged islands.

*

Brunch at Jack’s was a mirror meal of the one I’d had at Dupar’s the night before I left:  eggs all around and a stack of communal pancakes in the center.

That night I worked alongside my mom in the storied basement, sorting secrets from memories from garage sale items from trash.

Why did my mother keep so many empty boxes?  Why did my father keep so many trade show identity badges?

We toiled until nearly 3am, and started in again at 8am—purging, releasing, sorting, sharing, carrying the burden of impermanence up the steps, like Sisyphus, finding pleasure in the pure presence.

I took my father’s tefillin… unlaid for more than 70 years.  I felt his Navy dress threads hanging in the cedar closet at the absolute center of the bowels of the house.  I peered into the starkly empty safe in the center of the cedar closet floor, lurking below a bathroom rug… a hollow center, a potential space.

This ritual of purging years of material binging was all in preparation for departure, for the relinquishing of the house itself—a mean amalgam of bricks that prove poor fort against the ghosts of Native Americans, water leaking through tar-black roof, seeping into the basement to upend and crack the tiles.

*

I sat with my dad in the assisted living dining room that night, and then the next.  I cut, and shared, my father’s Chicken Kiev… thinking later of how Kiev was where his mother and father emigrated from, thinking of how my parents were in Russia when I had a heart problem and was in the hospital back when I was twenty-six.

That dining room is where we said good-bye, perhaps for this life, perhaps not.  Hotel California was playing on the speakers.  The irony was not lost on me—in the eternal Truth I can check out any time I like, but I can never leave.

*

I write these words in ink, with a pen, at an airport, gazing at a plane.

I will transcribe later, but I will not do justice to the treasures of this trip, to the love that floods me now in tears and sadness and joy and laughter and gratitude.

Do you see your Self in me?  I see You in every stranger in the security line and the waiting area seats—the lives we’ve all had together, this one an old enemy, that one an old best friend, lover, brother, kid or parent.

It’s been a long road but I am home now—home in Chicago, home at ORD, home in LA, home on this blog.

If you are with me on this you too are home—we are home together.  If this doesn’t make sense, I am here, and I will see you when you get home.

The eternal footman holds my coat and Snickers.  My nephew spills the Halloween candy and I get a Twix.  The plane is boarding and, anyway, you know what the music means…

So, let’s dedicate this day, this eternal day wherever you meet it, to all our collective children—at the school where I dropped my nephews this morning (“we don’t need no education…”) to the home my mom sits in alone, and yet not alone, to the assisted living where my dad and Steve joke about robbing the Shell station across the street.

Namaste, Bruce

Tags: ancestors