I exited the Massachusetts Turnpike in Westfield, onto route ten, where wooden planks leaned on trees, advertising fresh strawberries and peaches to the occupants of passing cars. To my right, Mount Tom towered above the green pastures and small houses of the Pioneer Valley. My heart fluttered like a hyperactive butterfly at the thought of surprising old friends, an hour into the throes of an orange flavored five hour energy shot. The sedan close in the rear view mirror kept my velocity higher than the suggested limit as I zipped by familiar restaurants, some with new names. In later reminiscence, we determined that it had been seven years since I’d been home.
Home, as we know, is a nebulous concept. I’ve had many homes: a pea-green trailer in French Quebec, a Victorian mansion in Western Massachusetts, and a cookie-cutter duplex in the suburbs of Detroit, to name a few. But having many homes, is in some way, having no home. As Dorothy noted, the beauty of home is that there’s no place like it. In my case, there are a few places like home.
Before long I reached Gunn Road, which runs parallel to a field of cows within the confines of an electric fence, upon which Alan and I had micturated in our adolescence (the fence, not the cows). I drove down the hill, parked the car next to others on the front lawn, and sauntered into the backyard barbecue.
I didn’t recognize many people at first, but as I scanned the party-goers I identified the outline of the only other woman I’ve come to call “Mom.” I let my presence speak for itself, and enjoyed watching her face register the reality of the moment before we fell into a warm embrace. Then Alan appeared, his blue eyes sparkling in a cloudy sort of way. He wore what is colloquially termed a wife-beater, like the old days, and as we hugged my sunglasses went skittering off into the grass behind me.
Before long, we were playing wiffleball in the yard, and when I stepped to the plate (read: lawn char), I was met with amiable heckles and the monikers “City Boy” and “Hollywood.” It was perhaps my designer jeans that did the trick, though I suspect the over-sized black sunglasses I picked up for ten dollars at the hippie music festival in Maine may have been ironically instrumental in the nicknames. True to form, I struck out with a mighty whoosh in my first at bat, but redeemed myself and my city by whacking a double into the horseshoe match behind second base (a sneaker) in my next.
At the evening’s onset, the sporting events shifted to those more directly associated with the sauce. Unfortunately, the mirth of beer pong (Beirut, in these parts), was lost on the Southampton police, who arrived brandishing their chests and flashlights. “It’s ridiculous for you to be out here right now – it’s midnight,” said one. Then he checked his watch, which if it read like mine, said quarter past eleven. “Almost,” he added. At this juncture the legal among us resumed our Wii bowling in the garage, the crash of pins echoing in the silence of the underage. Five or six empty threats later, the nineteen-year olds were sufficiently lectured, and the party, in the parlance of the power-tripping po-po’s, was over.
The couches now promised to the drunk children, Alan rigged me a makeshift bed of blankets on his bedroom floor. Sleep tugged at the back of our eyes as we lay, propping our heads with our hands, tuned into the inanities of the David Hasselhoff roast on Comedy Central.
Over the course of the day, it had become apparent that a college education wasn’t the norm in these circles, and the young-un’s breaking doors and falling down the stairs might be better suited to small-town life. It wasn’t a crowd, for better or worse, with much to say about Foucault. But as I drifted toward slumber, soothed by the rattles of the air conditioner and the shrieks of Gilbert Godfrey, I felt the invisible kinship that Alan and I had established in the late nineties, which considers not socio-economics, and in those sweet moments, I was home.
Being Thayer 