Scenes from Ohio

I drove to Ohio in a kind of fugue state Saturday, the kind of driving that seems like it can’t have been good because I can’t remember one second of it. I listened to a lot of podcasts.  Then I got home and returned my mother’s dog to her and let her treat me like the spoiled child I never was, catering to my every whim and calmly dealing with tantrums both incipient and launched (and by tantrums I mean panic attacks, a recent and entirely unwelcome addition to my life that will hopefully disappear as quickly as it arrived.)

(Sidenote, lest you are rolling your eyes at me for mooning about for too long over this break-up–not that I am not continuing to moon about, because I am–but a medium financial catastrophe has befallen Hilarity in Shoes enterprises and since it revealed itself, things on the mental well-being front have been…dicey. It seems unfair so close to being dumped, no?  Can’t a girl catch a break?)

My mother lives on a beautiful little lake, where deer and geese and red-tailed hawks wander around all the time.  It’s serene and lovely, and for a few minutes I thought to myself, I should live here.  I should live in the same neighborhood as my mom, and see her every day.  We would be so happy if we could do that. Then I thought of my sister, and how she never wants to go home any more, and I certainly can’t live that far away from her.  Then I realized that my mom and sister and I will probably never live in the same place again, and that is really unspeakably sad, when you have a mom like mine and a sister like mine.  We should be together.

My aunt had a party, just like the one I envisioned here.  Of course, when I long for those family gatherings, I always forget that half of the family isn’t speaking to the other half, and that all of my cousins have wives and girlfriends with whom I have no relationship and probably never will.  So while it was nice to hold their babies, and it tugged on my heartstrings the way any generic baby does, it was lacking a certain technicolor intensity that I think only exists in my memories now.  When I was small my cousins and I spent every weekend together, and for a long time I thought that’s how life would unfold, with our babies crawling around while we played euchre like our parents had.  Sometimes I can still picture how peaceful it would feel to be in the center of that hubbub permanently, how much I would like to compare gardens with my aunts and feed everybody.

But then, besides the whole giant family schism that will never be healed thing, one of my cousins dropped the N-word, right into regular conversation like it was no big thing, with one arm around his elementary school-aged daughter.  It was going to just pass, unremarked, as though we were living in some kind of alternate 1930s reality, but even as exhausted and depressed as I currently am, no one–and certainly no one whose diaper I have ever changed–gets to say that in front of me.  I interrupted him and said, We don’t use that word, ever.  You should be ashamed of yourself.  A bit of a weak response, to be sure, but goddamn. Maybe it made an impression on his kid–who, now that I think of it, has a brother who’s half black.  Sometimes I think I don’t know where I came from, or how I turned out to be me.  I don’t mean that in a self-congratulatory way, I mean I literally don’t know.

You should smell rural Ohio in the twilight in August sometime, especially right when a hot, wet summer begins to shade into autumn.  The way the grass perfumes the air is a singular amazement.  Despite the difficulties going home always presents, something about that smell and the sight of the deep afternoon sunlight on the rolling hills fills up a place inside me that living in the city depletes entirely.  And the tomatoes…I am sorry to tell all of you with your own hometown pride, but tomatoes grown in central Ohio are the best tomatoes in the world. Vaffanculo, San Marzano, and you too, New Jersey.

One day, my mom and I went swimming at a little lake park in the country, with huge, lethal-looking metal waterslides, and a log roll that could maim a child, and a perilously high rings course that everyone fell off of, plummeting a good ten feet to the lake below.  It cost $2 to get in and would have seemed pleasantly old-fashioned when I was a kid; in 2011, it’s like going through a wormhole.

On the way back, we drove through the town where I was born and lived for my first three years, a tiny and very rural enclave in southeastern Ohio that makes the mid-sized city (pop. 40,ooo) I grew up in seem like a metropolis.  It turns out that the house I thought we lived in when I was born is actually the place we moved to when I was two; the house to which I came home from the hospital was a place I have never seen, and didn’t even know existed.  As a person who mines her own history relentlessly, always searching for some artifact that might hold the key to unlock the code, it was unsettling to have to add an entirely new and entirely significant point to my mental geography.  When we lived there, I was an only child, and my mom was 22 and stayed home with me while my dad went and did his rising-star thing at the local newspaper.  They made ice cream on the front porch sometimes, with an old hand-cranked bucket and rock salt and the whole nine yards.  They were very happy, and I was a legendarily calm and delightful baby.  Anything could have happened, to any of us.