It is funny that now, with my dissertation “done” I find myself a bit at a loss for words here.
I started a post in my head about Thanksgiving and another one about our last hospital stay. I started writing one about how Esmé has started sitting up unsupported…
But I think what I want to tell you is that last weekend I went to see a band play. It has easily been five years since I did that. The band wasn’t just any band, however. It was Phantogram…a band started by two people that I have known more or less since I was 4…two people who grew up in the little town in upstate New York that I called home–(where my Dad taught me to Walk it off). I haven’t been in touch with them in recent years…but they both fit into that category of person for me that I feel knows something fundamental about me, having known me as that nervous, overly-excited, totally weird kid that I was (and on some level, still am). And, as a result, they are people for whom I feel a special and completely unqualified happiness for in their successes (BTW they are on the Hunger Game Soundtrack…please check it out!).
I had lost touch…as I did with almost all the people I grew up with in that small town, until rather recently thanks to Facebook…You see I have had a tendency to turn in on myself when things change. When my parents divorced I became less of that excited weird kid and more and more of a sad (and angry) child–and when I was given a chance to start over 45 minutes away, I jumped on it. I was so happy to be somewhere else, and not to be known–not weird, not nerdy, not sad. I had a fresh start…
I enjoyed it for awhile. But it had the result of making me feel center-less, like I had stopped belonging anywhere. Back home I was a weird kid…but at least I was their weird kid.
As I stood out in the crowd the other night watching two people who I still can’t help but see as kids (one is paused at 6 and the other at 14 for some reason) despite the fact that they were bringing the place down in that beautiful combination that comes from talented entertainers/performers/musicians in front of a crowd filled with hometown pride, I noticed that even rows away there were faces I recognized from my childhood (even if the names weren’t always on the tip of my tongue)…and I was thinking about how lucky I was to grow up in a little town for a time.
I was thinking about how when I stopped turning in on myself after Ezzy was born, and started being open about life with her, people from this town started reaching out to show me support…as if the years apart didn’t matter. Every message I got from someone who knew me from childhood was a reminder that I still belonged there, in my little town.
It is a place where people still remember my uncle streaking through town on a dare, where I went to a prom party in a cow barn, where all of my childhood embarrassments live in the brains of at least one person there. It is the place that I know my second grade teacher remembers me, a beamed with pride when my mother told her I had completed my PhD. It is a place that taught me to be imaginative, to respect natural beauty, to appreciate the hard work of farming, to slow down sometimes (often because there are cows blocking your way), and to look out for your neighbors (not just the people who share your politics or beliefs). And it is a place where my former classmate’s mother, who works at the grocery store in town, never fails to say she is praying for Ezzy.
What a beautiful place to be from.