Coming home, take 473

I’m sitting on a plane that left from Detroit at an indecent hour. Having left an immoderately bright morning behind us, we are descending into a dreary midday sky over Boston. I am crooking my neck over the two slumbering figures between me and the oval window, which is finally showing us the grey-navy bay water and some pentagonal memorial-looking stone structure. I blush, reminded yet again of what a horrible Bostonian I am. I don’t go to Red Sox games, I’ve never been to Walden Pond, and then there’s this new something that I have yet to visit and admire. We sink shakily, and I feel like my spine has wrapped it’s arms around my belly button and is squeezing. It’s the same thing I feel when I meet people whose books I have read wonderingly, the same thing I used to feel in junior high when a boy I wasn’t sure liked me looked at my lips. It is magnified on the plane, accompanied by my breathy la ilaha ila Allah‘s. But the delightful-scary sensation isn’t caused only by the plane playing hopscotch on the wind. I’m excited to come home. Then I realize what I have just thought: home.

For years, maybe ever since high school, whenever I have come back to the place I am most rooted in at the moment, I have always thought about it like this: I’m going back to New York. I’m back in Amherst. I’m returning to Cairo. Everywhere, including Boston, has been the place that I happen to be living at the moment. I haven’t lived – that is, haven’t placed my bed – in any one room for more than nine months at a time since I was seventeen. That was nine years ago. Nothing has felt solid. It was all slipping through my fingers all the time, and this too might be slipping, but at the moment I’m ignoring that possibility. Suddenly, magically, Boston has become my home.

Few things can compare to the shivery thrill of the familiar. The beauty of this particular pleasure is so rare. New, bright and shiny things have an easy time fascinating us. But when you find yourself peculiarly enthralled by, say, your toaster, as opposed to the new iPhone sitting on your desk – that is a special moment.

Oh, how I love thee. Let me count the toasty mornings...

Now, I know that I have an unreasonable tendency to romanticize anything and everything that could possibly be construed as wholesome or New Englandy. Let’s leave that aside for the moment. Because what I want to say is this: what is familiar, known, comfortable already, the love of these types of things offers us a comfort incomparable to what is new and exciting.

This is what is easy: it is easy to fall in love with the new curve of a soft cheek, the sharp green smell of a new jacket, the inevitably surprising softness of a new hand. This is what is difficult: to hold hands for the 857th time and feel your heart jump a little, the priviledge of being beloved, and companionably touched, by this person still impossible to take for granted. To fall in love is no achievement. To stay in love? A feat of wonder.

You knew I was going to do that.

Of course, I’m as clueless as everyone else (except, apparently, our darling President and his lovely wife) when it comes to the actual realization of this feeling with another person. Generally, I am enamored more of the old than the new. I’m hoping this is a good start. But I’ve found myself changing, as well – where I used to think that I would never manage to be anything other than a die-hard country bumpkin, I find myself more and more unable to imagine living in Amherst again – or any place like it. I have started to enjoy the smallness of the city and its possibility, the thrill of meeting someone at my local cafe and then realizing as I walk home that we live on the same street. I find that there is something peculiarly enjoyable in having so much access to so much life by foot and bike, and in passing so many people on the street. I used to think that there was nothing I would trade for the pleasant, breezy solitude of an aimless country drive – but I find now that a stroll by the river or through residential streets with a friend is preferable.

It is not the promise of newness that the city offers me. The city is, in most ways, just as mundane as the country. We have routines just as those in the suburbs do. We have circles of people we are used to seeing, grocery stores we visit, the baristas that can greet us by name. I don’t attend every lecture or exhibit; I am not persistently aware that the next person walking through the door of my office could be someone I’ve never met before – I don’t live my days in anticipation.

What is it? Perhaps Boston has bred into me a love of rotaries and an endless supply of unnamed streets – or the Irish-y tendency to nickname places with the most endearing possible epithet: Southie, JP, Dot. As though the places are good childhood friends.

Maybe it was only a matter of time, and no matter where I had laid my head for most of the years since graduation it would have been the same. Perhaps I could have felt the same way about Cairo, or L.A., had I remained in either place. Perhaps it was a matter of knowledge and connectedness; I know more Boston history (what could be more charming than a whole sprawl of roads built on cow paths?) than any other place – excepting maybe Amherst. And then there is that so many of those I admire and wish to emulate have at least passed through this city: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Barack Obama, Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Malcolm X, Jhumpa Lahiri.

It could also be my stubbornness. It might be easy to love Florida, with her sunny promises, or L.A., because she flirts with fame – or even the slick, forward New York, all gaunt limbs and labels. But Boston, who has given us so many people that make us proud to be American, whose people do ridiculous things like throwing tea into the ocean and naming walls in ballparks ‘The Green Monstah,’ what of her? Maybe we could use some more street signs; perhaps we could do without a Bertucci’s or Cheesecake Factory here and there. Perhaps we’d have more good, old-fashioned summertime fun if we didn’t risk serious infection by dipping a toe into the Charles – but really, where’s the excitement in that?

I don’t need things to be so easy, so sunny, so sophisticated. The New Englander in me recoils a bit from these things – the moment I decided I couldn’t stay in L.A., I was watching a nipped-and-tucked woman draped in gold lamé and skin-tight everything shuffle into a hippie-vegan brunch spot in stilletos. On a Saturday. I don’t want to be that stylish – or primped – I just want to eat my organic tofu scramble in my jammies, thankyouverymuch. I mean, what are Saturday mornings for?

Seriously?...like, in the daytime?

Ultimately, I suppose, this feeling continues to be a mystery. And now that I am so close (less than five months – and counting) to maybe-leaving Boston, it feels more present – and more precious. What is it to be home? To love a thing?

Muppie takes the Fifth.

On a day like today

On a day like today, life is waking up. With the marvelous blustery wind kissing our faces, we’re reminded of our summer selves. We come back to life and back outside, prowling the city sidewalks in hope of a warm raindrop on the face, or the glimpse of an opening crocus. All of life is singing a chorus of living – and it is wonderful to be alive, and here in New England.

Almost all of the charm of living here is wrapped up in today’s wind – in its hope, its promise of summer, its reminder that the cycles are about to move again – just when we were beginning to think we’d lost them forever.

It is plain, and yet still amazing, to see and feel for oneself how much sway nature holds over us. Over our moods, the hours we keep, our dress, our manner with each other, and whether or not we drive with the windows down. It’s such a liberating thing to do after a winter encased completely in glass. You wouldn’t think it – but it’s transformative. It always has been, for me. And I’m suddenly in high school again, singing along to, I don’t know, Dave Mathews Band or Mambo #5 (remember that? what an awful song) and sneaking cigarettes between ballet and home.

I don’t smoke anymore, thank God, and I don’t want to; but still the feeling of sticking my naked hand out the car window and feeling the air go over it, and not freeze it, is like nothing else in the world.

One word: awesome.

It’s my hometown, and my first car (a navy ’88 Volvo 250 GL named Stella), and every spring break, and summers in Maine, and sleeping outdoors – spring is coming of age all over again.

I have no desire to relive my teen years. I’m nostalgic about certain things, but the fact remains that a lot of the experience, at the time, was nothing short of brutal. Even so – nothing compares to the memories of catching fireflies on my high school’s baseball diamond at four in the morning with my best friend – and, well, I just don’t do stuff like that anymore. For starters, I don’t even know where the nearest baseball diamond is. And wandering around the streets of the city in your pajamas at four a.m. is a lot creepier than giggling down a couple of hushed country blocks at thirteen. Too bad, really.

It’s these kind of harmless and vaguely stupid things that I miss. I have a distinct feeling that, eleven years from now, if I happen to catch my niece (who is now two) sneaking back into the house after a few hours of bug-catching, half-naked gallivanting, I won’t kick back and tell her, “Yeah, I used to do that, too. Ah, the days!” I more imagine myself saying something like, “Good way to get grounded.” Not because I’m into being tyrannical – it’s just, well, she’s two. And a tiny two. She’s tiny, and precious, and the thought of her being out without some tenaciously protective relative like myself in the middle of the night makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Of course, my mother would have reacted the same way if she knew about my teenage nocturnal wanderlust. Cuz that’s how the adults are. And I suppose I am one now. (If not now, when?)

So yes, I feel a bit of a pang thinking of those sillier days running barefoot down my street with eight other girls under a full moon. Or night-swimming (my generation takes REM’s advice very seriously) in some pond.

(There are stupider and funnier stories, but I’ll leave it at that, in the interest of my dignity.)

The real power of the emerging spring is in reminding us of glories past. The fact that they’re returning makes the memories more vivid and more delectable for our minds…I can’t speak for the rest of you, but my enjoyment is wrapped up in also planning all of the warm things I’ll do this year – picnics, hikes, reading poetry under a blooming tree, walking through the grass barefoot, wearing sandals, preferably a walk in the warm rain at some point with a good friend to discuss the meaning of life, frisbee, soccer, iced drinks, the condensation on the outside of said drinks, fruit pies, and sleeping with the windows wide open. I’m planning on all of these and more. Perhaps it’s more powerful this year because I missed last spring encased in Cairo’s fine dust. God knows best.

And while I’m planning, I’m reminded also of things I miss and can’t have back. I’m going to be honest with you: I miss the nineties a great deal. It might be unfair of me – I can’t have been all that involved. After all, I was a green seventeen when we rang in the new millennium, so the early nineties were admittedly a bit of a blip. But I believe we’ve lost some of the natural, earthy charm of the nineties – spring’s dirty smell is a bittersweet reminder that not everything is controlled by the human race, and I think we were better at accepting that ten years ago. I’m willing to allow that it might be my nostalgic fancy altogether, but I don’t think it is.

Remember when our heroes were Ben Harper, Eddie Vedder, and Janeane Garofalo? Remember when a pleasantly plump, philosophically-minded Ethan Hawke was the heartthrob? I mean, way back when, before anyone ever thought you needed to bring sexy back? When sexy was not antithetical to slightly worn clothes and something other than a six-pack? Man I miss those days. I miss matte lipstick, and pajama-clad brownie fights that turned into love scenes. Now we’ve got perfectly-coiffed kisses even when they’re in the rain. Can’t someone’s mascara at least run? And what happened to grunge, and flannel, and Doc Martens? Remember when social activism wasn’t a popularity coin celebrities could cash in with the tabloids? (I’m sure some of them are sincere….I just think the mixing of the two is a little insidious.) Remember when everyone used Manic Panic? Dying your hair a really awful color used to be a right of passage. Now the fifteen-year-olds are better with makeup and hair irons than I am. I mean, everyone’s prettier – and maybe that’s great – but isn’t there room for a little bit more, a little bit different, a little punk? I miss the freedom of those days. I had frizzy hair that was occasionally different colors, and braces, and fairly awful tapered jeans, but at least I was comfortable being myself.

My own imperfect charm (real or imagined) is likewise wrapped up in that remarkable decade. I started out pleasantly buck-toothed, but by the end of the it I had a perfect smile – however fake. I was (still am, truth be told) missing a tooth up front. It was attached to my retainer after I got my braces off, and I used to “forget” it some days, just to flash my pirate smile at my friends. They would play-cringe and then marvel. My sister advised me to never have a permanent bridge made; now I have one, but it’s broken, giving me back that snaggle-toothed appeal (work with me). When her friend called me pretty, the same sister simply said, “Did you see her tooth?” We’ve been spoiled out of appreciating the irregular, the arresting, the unusual.

On a day like today, I miss that. I miss the variety – is it possible to say that I miss the counter-culture being popular? But I feel that the Parises of the world have taken over in a bleached, starved fury, and I miss it when the popular kids in school played “Angel from Montgomery” at the talent show and had green hair. I miss my own bleached-blonde stripe in the front of my hair (homemade, of course; a brassy yellow declaration of independence). I did it in the spring; no surprise there. I did it sunbathing with my sister in the secluded backyard. My parents hated it, but at least there was some variety.

But hope springs eternal. The flowers are about to come back, in all their sneeze-inducing, mutlicolored, variously-shaped glory, and we’re all more than ready for them. April rain will run our mascara, and soak the hems of our jeans, and leave us all soggily unattractive – even if the movies deny us the pleasure of a parallel reality. And after all, the fifties reigned in starched, stiff, regular beauty – and then the sixties came and tore down that unanimous empire. I’m not holding my breath – and I’m the first to admit that it ain’t all bad (hair products have certainly improved, to no one’s disappointment).

I’m just going to say this, then: here’s to the coming season, and greasy-haired leading men, and acoustic music. And while I’m at it, here’s to my missing pirate tooth. Yar. Take that, ye pretty ladies.