Happy Black Friday, Campers!
Last year, I (Sam) was home early for Thanksgiving because of a loss in the family. At a local coffee shop, the same coffee shop I’d been going to since I was probably thirteen years old, I ran into a group of moms of old friends from high school. After a series of disastrous social exchanges on my part, followed by rushed goodbyes, I decided I should message my friends to confirm that their moms didn’t get the impression that my dad had been in a terrible accident. (Truly disastrous)
The next thing I knew, I was sitting at a bar with Lara Avery; her mom was witness to the coffee shop disaster. We were cackling all night. From the moment we saw each other from across the bar - the first time in over a decade - our volume began earning dirty looks from the other patrons.
Lara just released her latest and debut novel for adults, The Year of Second Chances! Meg Mitchell Moore says “Avery’s funny and engaging writing, plus Robin’s strong voice, will keep readers turning pages.” You must follow this link to get your copy.
We are so excited that she is sharing this clever and resonating meditation on hometowns with our campers.
Like, share, subscribe! And please welcome Lara to MC in the comments!
LYLAS,
Marilyn and Sam
Ur Misguidance Counselors
(@misguidance4u)
My hometown is off a highway, a clump of buildings you pass through en route to other places. When Topekans are asked where they’re from, people often respond, “Oh, I’ve driven through there.”
We’re big enough to be the capital of our state, but small enough to get from one end of town to the other in fifteen minutes, ten if you speed. (Everyone speeds.) Big enough for two local TV stations, small enough that they share headlines. Big enough for four Dairy Queens, eight Walmarts, one Unitarian church, one mosque, and one Jewish temple. Small enough that when you’re back in town, people know.
I imagine every American must feel, at some point, the same unique twist of the stomach when flicking your blinker on the highway, exiting the formless freedom of looking for your home, entering the worn grooves of being there.
On the rare visits I made in my twenties, I used to put on all the songs I loved in high school, musing as I passed landmarks: I can’t believe the Dairy Queen is still here. Perhaps what I was really saying was, I can’t believe I have lost the unencumbered jog across 17th Street, coins jangling; I can’t believe I can no longer carry my dipped cone to the elementary school playground; I can’t believe I can no longer sit on the still-warm metal of the slide with my treat, thoughts drifting with the pollen and fireflies, bits of long division, skinned-knee crushes and pop song quotes; I can’t believe I can’t go home to catch the last of Growing Pains before bed; I can’t believe it’s not 1997. I can’t believe time hasn’t swallowed this tiny building full of ice cream like it swallowed me.
Yes, this is nostalgia—a longing for what cannot be brought back—but it’s also a celebration of specificity. The precision of memory and self, the separation of this Dairy Queen from all the others in the world, all the other 17th Street Dairy Queens in the memories of all the other patrons. As I used to pass through town, lighting a cigarette like only an adult could do, I caught myself bringing out memories and holding them like baby animals to my chest: the Dairy Queen of the heart, mine and only mine.
But I was right to leave quickly and often. Such Proustian reveries were destabilizing, untethering me between different performances of selfhood. I began to see too many November-December sunrises, fighting hangovers in my twin bed. I dreaded being recognized at Walmart and became offended when I wasn’t. When acquaintances told me about marriage or children, I complimented them to excess, but no one seemed to acknowledge my own perceived milestones of adulthood: overwork, whimsical travel, promiscuity. No one cared I got my jacket in Barcelona.
It was not until the plane back to wherever I had come from, jostled in with everyone who had a more certain sense of belonging, that I would succumb to the child-like vulnerability that I had tried so hard to avoid–weeping quietly into the sleeve of my foreign jacket, adopting my elderly seatmate as a surrogate maternal figure, scarfing down with enthusiasm a holiday-themed tray of boxed mashed potatoes and bland turkey I would normally dismiss. But that wasn’t sustainable. You can’t go on boomeranging in time; you won’t function. You get stuck staring out windows and listening to the same songs over and over.
You declare a new home that keeps you hard and awake. Hot people, nice clothes, exciting art. But then time passes anyway, and suddenly you’re not hot anymore, and when you look up from the cosmopolitan haven you thought you’d found—where ice cream is organic and children aren’t allowed to wander anywhere by themselves, let alone to the Dairy Queen—you realize you are getting too tired for the hunt for newness, too achy to work on your feet all day with the young people, too old to enjoy their attempts at poetry, too broke to afford the rent.
Like many, I found myself back in my hometown at the beginning of the pandemic, unsure whether or not I would stay. Everything I owned except for my car fit in a studio apartment U-Haul, so I took two trips. From new home to old home, I drove the same long road for 36 hours back and forth, dipping in and out of service through the Ozark mounds of Arkansas. I had no job waiting for me, told no one but my parents and brothers that I was coming.
In that solitude, past selves shed like skin. The ripples of my various communities—their projects, alliances, rumors—slowed to stillness. My only obligation was to survive and to arrive in time to get a key from the landlord. It’s no wonder why the term “liminal” rose in popularity in certain corners of the internet during this time—a word that means not here nor there, in transit, in between. We were all completely blind to the future, and yet what we understood as our present was becoming memory in real time.
Places you’d been just weeks ago became dusty as if abandoned for years. People became ghosts, masked apparitions you could only conjure through the rituals of safety, only seen through a veil of distance.
Side by side (because we couldn’t do anything else), my mom and I would walk up and down the neighborhood, all over the streets of my childhood, speculating on the wellbeing of family members we hadn’t seen in years, neighbors who hadn’t yet aged out of their homes, old friends who never left.
As we waited out the disease, me looking for work and Mom looking for meaning, what used to be disbelief about the passage of time—I can’t believe time hasn’t swallowed my high school like it swallowed me—became gratitude for everything and everyone resilient to it. Evolving with it, meeting it, and embracing it.
Transforming in the new long light of hotter summers, two new community gardens sprung up. I started to notice that inch by inch, the city’s history of racial reckoning placed its flag further into public consciousness. First, there was nothing, then there was a mural, a museum, a park. The library that started as a ladies’ reading club 153 years ago now checks out over one million books a year. At the historical society they remember my grandparents, though many of the staff weren’t old enough to talk before my grandma died. It’s impossible to see any of this from a speeding car. Suddenly you look up and it’s been a year since you exited and entered. Suddenly the highway becomes a home.
I thought that settling here would be the most frightening thing I have ever done, but it turns out that the more you accept the collapse of time, the less it threatens to overwhelm you. Five blocks away from where my parents have lived for over 30 years, and about ten blocks from the Dairy Queen, I bought a house with a backyard full of weeds, five crawl spaces, and a mysterious footprint in the basement. I borrow tools I once used to earn allowance. The piercing specificity of remembering dulls with use. The world will surprise me no matter where I live.
Behind the DQ, they made a laundromat into a coffee shop. On hot afternoons, I’ll sit on its patio with an iced latte. Sometimes I’ll see people I knew from high school, their kids in tow. I’ll say hi, re-introduce myself, and tell them where I live now. Sometimes I get the urge to leave.
As I watch the line form for ice cream, I put in my headphones and scroll through the music, looking for a song I haven’t heard before.
Missed My Exit by Lara Avery, (@_webothlovesoup, www.laraavery.com)
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