calculating distance
by bam
i was feeling faraway the other night, so i pulled out my little jar of pushpins and made me a map.
that would be my village, right up there, sticking up from the puzzle piece of the fine ol’ u.s. of a. a piece i could trace with my eyes closed, the little stocking foot for florida, the turkey neck of maine, the round smooth back of the california coast, and, i guess, the dangly belly of the lone star state. poor texas. poor dangly-belly texas.
i just now did the math. if i hopped in my old wagon, if i packed a case of water bottles, threw in some granola, and a banana or two, if i started driving, heading north, north-east for starters, and kept driving ’til i waved hello to all my brothers–there are four, you know–i would clock 5,304 miles. i would be on the road, without potty breaks, mind you, for 81.6 hours, or 3.4 days.
and that’s clippin’ along at 65 mph, not catchin’ a single wink. not even a Z. let alone a little string of zzzzs.
no wonder i hardly ever borrow a cup of sugar from the one who lives in maine. or long beach. or prescott valley, arizona. or, heck, not even toledo, a mere 215 miles, door-to-door. because blessedly my baby brother picked the toledo in ohio and not clear off in spain.
now, once upon a time, we all lived in the same area code, but that was so long ago the area codes hadn’t been broken into a hundred little chunks per metropolitan area. and as recently as just last year, when i put out the call for family dinner, i could count on my doorbell ringing a full three times. i set nine places at the table. we were a raucous noisy crowd.
but now, one year and two days later, i would call only my mother. at eighth-grade graduation last week, we did our very best to keep up the noise. my mama, thanks to a fine sauvignon blanc, had us in stitches, she truly did.
but some times, some times when i hang up the phone, i feel so very far away. and it gets me to thinking how odd it is that the very dearest souls in my life are spread across the map.
i’m not there to bump into them on the sidewalk. can’t look into their eyes and see the heavy load, the one that’s wearing one to the bone. can’t reach across the table, and give a hand a squeeze. geez, i couldn’t even see the sparkly ring one just gave his true love. i had to twiddle my thumbs while the airlines took a reservation, cleared two seats, flew them clear to here from the desert far away.
too far sometimes.
and then there is the circle of oldest, dearest friends. heck, you would think someone took my heart, tossed it in the air and watched the pieces come down coast-to-coast. there’s the one i love in key west. another handful in new york city and environs and two off in the city of angels.
of my best old friends, two, i kid you not, do not have computers. fool me, falling for the types who would do without technology in a world that’s nearly wholly hard-wired.
that means we are left to letters. oh, yes, let me sit right down here and squeeze some letter-writing into the day. and phone calls. and i don’t know about you but even a phone call these days is pressed for chance and time.
some weeks, when one of us is feeling lonely, the back-and-forth phone messages can last all week. can constitute a hyphenated sort of stringing together verbal bits. the pressing matter spit out in 60-second sound bites, or longer if the phone machine does not rudely cut someone off in the middle of a heartache.
and, fool i am again, i barely use a cell phone, so to catch me you have to catch me in my kitchen. before i am tossing around a skillet in the narrow window of 5:55 to 6:25.
how, i ask you, in a world in which to circle the wagons is to operate in four time zones, countless area codes, and even more ZIP codes, is a soul supposed to be there for the silence between the syllables? know the joy of hearing the other’s footsteps come bounding up the walk? catch the raised eyebrow that hints, this here is a tease, or a really important point, one you might want to lean in for, one you do not want to miss by getting up to clear the plates?
i miss the ones i love. i miss them deeply and achingly. i miss, most of all, the waking up to the possibility that on any given day i might take a taste of one’s fine balsamic dressing, hear the other one pounding out some bach or brahms, find my boys climbing over them like ants to a popsicle.
this long-distance needs a spin through my dryer. maybe i could shrink it. reach out and hold on tight to the ones i love.
how bout you, people? how long and far and infrequently do you connect with the ones who truly make you who you are? do you, like me, have a global village that takes a dsl to bring you close? do you miss the plain old touch of a hand across the table? the spontaneity of a long tall glass poured there at the kitchen counter, walked out to the front stoop, where, together, you can watch the world go by? i know we’ve spent time talking about the little things you can drop in the mail, and the way you can fuss when someone’s coming in from out of town. but heck, some days there is no substitute for the real live thing. and right in here, as one school year ends and a summer begins, it can get a little lonely, eh?
Barb, The FIRST question that comes to my mind for you is–WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?” It is SUMMER where there are NO SCHEDULES.–you just wrote about that. You were just at the library and stocked up on BOOKS–you wrote about that. So, now the logical next step is to pack everyone in the car and do the FAMIY ROAD TRIP a la Mahany–which you will write about in the future. Instead of having all the loved ones in the car to visit distant places, visit all the loved ones in their distant places. There is absolutely nothing holding you back. Try hopping in the car just for the drive to Ohio, visit that brother and see what happens. Maybe you’ll see how easy it is, pick up that brother, then, zip to the east coast for more visits. Next, slide down the coast to Florida, then gun it West to AZ. After that, it would be back home. Along the way, will you pass near your Luddite Girlfriends who are not hooked to the Internet? I hope so. But, the main thought is “Go For It”–take your mom with you too. It couid take 10-21 days, but it would be such the fun summer adventure for you and your boys. Report back!
Yes, we all carry maps in our hearts. Mine includes Chicago and environs, greater Boston, NYC, South Florida, DC, Southern California, the scattered places my loves from those places have re-settled, and of course the San Francisco Bay Area, where this weekend I spent face time with wonderful people between Santa Cruz and Sonoma with plenty of stops in between.(my sense of the Bay Area is pretty expansive). Savored good talk with a former editor who taught me a lot about how to handle my present work with humor and tenacity, a dance pal with whom I really click on the floor, my beloved Ruth and her daughters, a colleague on a committee who shares my fascination with the civil rights movement and who documented plenty of it with his camera. During every one of these conversations I marveled at how rich it was to sit near enough to see the smiles coming on, observe the twinkle in their eyes, interpret the sighs. I also crave more of this human contact than I’m willing to admit — no wonder I tend to pack my travels full of it (always returning home more exhilarated than exhausted) and race to check my e-mail every morning, even before I brush my teeth!
I’m with Carol, cross Ohio off your list, at least!!
I’m sort of the opposite of you bam, but I feel the same. I left the homeland and settled far away, alone among the siblings. I miss everyone too, so much, so very much. There’s two families I know that I am very jealous of. All the children settled near the parents and have raised kids so near their grandparents; they take vacations together, they share Sundays together, they celebrate celebrations together. I want–have always wanted–what they have. What fortuitous, curious convergence of the stars has kept those families together in this so-mobile time? Why am I out here dangling all by my self in the midwest? My family still refers to where I live as “back east”; they have imagined me even farther away than I actually am.Moreover, my dear ones from my midwestern, grown-up life are scattered to every far reach of the globe now. Last year at this time one of the last few in this area and I decided on a whim to declare a reunion of all of those dear ones; some are coming from China and Colorado, but those in Ireland, Egypt, Greece, and California will not. We will meet in a few weeks for four short glorious days, getting to see for the first time in some cases the children that have come to us, hear the tales of the travels, the lives so far away.There’s something just a little screwed up about the mobility capabilities of our world. Somehow the ability to move on becomes the mandate to move on–for what purpose, to what end, I am not sure. I can’t critique it too much, however, because I did it myself. And now I am in the unenviable position of creating and recreating community, over and over, season after season, departure after departure. Because I simply require community, neighbors, loved ones. To be sure, visits are nice, but they simply cannot take the place of lived, daily contact. They can’t restore the expectedness, the stability, the settled-down comfortable fact of presence, of neighborliness, of nearness.Instead, we choose what we choose, for thousands of reasons, we move, we shuffle away or settle in. And then we are either the ones who have left or the ones who are left behind, and no matter how you slice it sometimes it’s awfully lonely and sad.
What JCV says rings true. Maybe moving and separation is the essence of who first populated America. Up until even the last 10 years of cell phone and e-mail and IM and blogs, when you left someplace for another place, it was not all that easy to communicate. Think of all of our first-settler ancestors–they came by boat. They sent letters back and forth that took weeks and months to arrive. There was usually never even a chance to hear a voice again, or to meet in person. Aching for family was probably more the norm than the exception for our ancestors, on each side of the ocean.