Home

I talked to my parents last night, and now I feel like the worst son in the world. I’m sure that’s not true, and I doubt I would even come in second (thank you Menendez brothers), but I’m feeling pretty bad about myself anyway.

I had planned to go home more often this year. I’m fortunate to have to two homes. The one I share with Connie and the kids, and the one that I was raised in. Mom and Dad still live in that home, soon to be fifty years. The rooms are much smaller now, and the yard…which once fielded kickball games and bike races…now seems hardly long enough to play a decent game of catch. But I was kid size then, and the world was much bigger. That yard was a war zone and a jungle. It was our playground and it was plenty. Summers in that yard were sweaty and dirty and full of adventure.

My brother David and I shared a room back then, and our beds ran alongside the wall by the window. In the summer we’d lay with our heads at the footboards, because that was where the window was. Downstairs, Dad had placed a window fan in the laundry room window and had it pointed blowing out. Footboard to footboard, head to head, we lay there in that open window as the air drafted over us and raced downstairs to be forced out through the humming blades and back outside to cool further in the dewy night.

Many nights we’d lay there quietly, watching the stars and listening to the far off sound of trucks dropping gears on the hill just past our exit two miles away. The sound travelled so clearly at night. We could imagine them driving through the darkness, headlights beaming, hot thermos of coffee to keep the weary driver awake. We could see all this because we had seen it before. We had watched Dad leave many times, and had ridden with him enough to know how it looked when he checked his mirrors, dropped the clutch, shifted gears and eased into the road. It was real to me then and it is to me now. If I catch a whiff of diesel exhaust while driving, while Connie and the girls turn up their noses, I am taken back to my childhood, and I stay there as long as I can.

My last visit to my Kentucky home was just after Christmas. Our plan was to celebrate with the entire clan, swapping gifts and eating too much food. It seems that most of our traditions revolve around food, so it was fitting that food ruined our visit. On the way to there we stopped to eat a quick dinner. About an hour later, thirty minutes after arriving at Mom and Dad’s house, the long, ugly night of bathroom visits began.

All five of us were violently ill. Whatever we had eaten seemed to be eating us up inside. We were miserable. By 8:30 the next morning, with almost no sleep from any of us, I was sure of two things: we weren’t better and we couldn’t face my family that afternoon.

I love my family, but I also know my family. It would have been impossible to be quarantined. Someone would have broken through the shield to check on us, and with the dam broken, the flood of well meaning visitors would have started. We would have been killed with sympathy and stories about the time they too had food poisoning. That, plus the prospect of not having unrestricted access to the bathrooms forced me into the difficult decision of renting two hotel rooms nearby. Sad, weak and pathetic we left our gifts and the smell of Mom’s cooking and banished ourselves to the Best Western. The party went on, but we slept through it. Our holiday visit officially a disaster.

The plan was always to return soon. Probably within a month, but surely no more than two. Now it is mid-April and I still have no date set. How does life keep driving us away from what we so desperately want to do? I make excuses, and they seem like pretty good ones at the time, but as calendar days drop rapidly into the past, they look more and more like opportunities lost.

I call Mom and Dad and I ask what they are doing. Each week, they say the same thing. They are sitting in the den and they are doing okay. In my mind I can see them, Mom on one end of the couch and Dad in his chair. The Television flashes blue light across their faces. Every evening they sit…and I make excuses.

I wanna go home….