Country Blues

For this project, I focused on Sweet Home Chicago. The song concerns a romantic relationship, but the image of going to the airport holds more meaning as something shared among family members to me, so I changed the relationship to a maternal one. Two related questions dominated the piece for me: Are you home when you land, or when you are at your front door's threshhold? Have you left when the door locks behind you, or when take off?

Back to California, through Chicago. I used to want to go. You tell me, I used to want to go.

You never took me to the airport. Or you did, but you’d stay in the car and hug me goodbye through the rolled-down passenger side window. I’d step back, and you’d roll it back up, and I’d squint through the tint for a face to give a cheap smile to—an ‘it will be better’ smile, only one side of my lips curled up, the other pretending to droop. You would go home and fold the patterned quilt on my bed into a neat square, and I would look through SkyMall, stopping on ads with beds and girls, folding the pages over so they were just ads of girls. You wanted me to call when I landed. I called when I got home. I was always careful to not use the word “home.”

But now you’re here, with a hand on one strap of my duffel, reading me the record locator. “Your ticket says its 65 there?” It says that beside a half-penciled in Sudoku board, half scratched out. I don’t know who started the game. I do not envision myself getting bored enough to finish it. You repeat, “65 degrees.” I have room in my bag for my coat, but I keep it on. The strap of the duffel pulls on your arm, and your back starts to bend over, like the flat brim on the hat I forgot to pack. 

“You must be so excited to go.” This is the third iteration. You’re convincing yourself of that now. You know that, and I know that, but it’s more comfortable if we pretend to be mutually ignorant so I nod and you scan the tickets for absent ETAs and seat numbers and other uninteresting facts good for prodding silence off, like a slinky that keeps stopping one step below. My baggage tag prints and I fix it around the vacant strap loosely. You and Dad met on a plane. He vacations without you.

“Junior year was fun.” You think of the non-secret things you haven’t told anyone in the family—a crooked elm by a stop sign you peed behind, a boy who never kissed—and settle on one you will share, but then we’ve backed away from “junior year” and you just lay a hand on my shoulder, by my collar. Your fingers are swollen. You withdraw your hand, or I shirk it off. Either way it tickled.

I’ll text when I’m in Chicago. Text when I’m in San Fran. Call when I’m in Berkeley. I may wash my hands first. I will forget I stuffed a bag of m and m’s in my backpacks water-bottle holder.

Love you is much easier to say than miss you, so I say the former and hear the latter. I do think about what I’ll miss: free Excedrin, my towel-rack, the excuse for not meeting people of having to stay-in. It’s implicit you’re in there somewhere. I’ll maintain not being able to say so explicitly is hereditary. If I have kids, I hope there will be other junior year stories I don’t tell them and ma.

Through Chicago, back to California.