the perils of taking the baby snatcher back to the future

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It’s July, cold and rainy in Addis. In America, it’s hot. A grand time to be there instead of here. The Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt leaves Bole International Airport near midnight. They call it the ‘Baby Snatcher’ as it leaves under the cover of darkness filled with white folks retuning west with Ethiopian babies. Though I’ve got no baby on board, there will be plenty stateside I’ve never met: Henry, Mira, Waylon, Gretchen, Ryder, Pearl, Veronica. The rest of home leave will entail little sleep, an orgy of meat and drink, a little art, and the hopeless attempt to make meaningful the relationships of memory. In the end, only the babies are unburdened by memory.

Within moments of landing in Frankfurt, I know I have come back to the future. In the airport bathroom, the toilet paper is so thick you can wrap it around you like a scarf. And when you flush, the toilet seat rotates and is washed. I flush twice just to watch the future happen. Astounding. Then I go to America. Despite claims that the end is nigh, here too the future is wondrous. Things are cleanish and relatively efficient. The electricity and water work, all day. No goats or donkeys wander through the streets, and they are generally free of prostitutes and potholes as well. The silence of horns is deafening. The sidewalks are strangely devoid of people in wheel chairs and on crutches chanting ‘bread. money. mister.’ Children go to schools rather than spend their days beseeching passersby to buy chewing gum or kleenex out of shoe box lids. Grocery stores are exquisite temples to culinary consumption. Trucks bigger than elephants fill vast soulless strip mall parking lots offering 101 flavors of fast food and a profusion of mass produced sameness. And the wealth of other seriously good restaurants still serve single portions large enough to feed an entire Ethiopian village for a week. The West is breathtaking.

While this unthinkable cornucopia of consumables is awe-inspiring, conversations overheard are alone worth coming back for. It’s amazing the things you hear when people speak a language you understand. Perhaps the jibber jabbering one table over in the restaurant, in line at the grocery store, at the end of the bar, or in the dentist waiting room is simply white noise when you are immersed in it. But when you aren’t, you listen intently because it’s impossible not to. It’s intriguing, perplexing, tragic, riveting, mind numbingly banal, profoundly misinformed, and comically ridiculous. Then there is the crazy. Indisputably, there is a buffet of crazy everywhere, but I particularly relish the apocalyptic millennialist crazy you get stateside. It is invariably served with a heaping side of insane glorification of some non-existent past. In a coffee shop in Texas called Sweet Eugene’s, evangelical Christians, blissfully ignorant of the incongruity, attempt to get Ann Rand to fit into their Bibles. In another corner of America, I am spellbound by laments for the end of empire and pining for the halcyon days of yore when men were free, when infant and maternal mortality was high, life expectancy low, worker’s rights non-existent, and a cuple yeers uh educashun wuz good enuf. I am sure this nonsense is available everywhere, but its hard to savor when you can’t understand it. Coming home, the real strain is not the crazy or the little inconsequential accoutrements of modernity. Rather, it’s the collision of the present with the remembered past that gets you. The people you know, not the ones you don’t.

round 1: Algonquin Provincial Park

In Toronto, the past meets me at the gate. Friends I have always had and always known. Each, myself included, harboring suspicions that they are generally surrounded by idiots. For the next week, I suspect we will all be correct in that suspicion. We are going to the woods. Not to live deliberately, but rather to find a common ground where the chasm of vastly different experiences can be crossed. There is strong faith that 4 boxes of wine, 2 bottles of bourbon, a bag of grass, and a lot of rowing can facilitate this. Algonquin Provencal Park is neutral ground. We can row across the ravages of time with only the baggage we pack in. The rest of home leave will be about meeting people again within their contexts, within their framework of familiarity, within their comfort zones. Luckily, I have a week in the woods with a prison guard, a lawyer, and a stage manager to get my head ready for America.

The week, as expected, is ridiculous. There is paranoia about bear attacks and serious effort devoted to carving spears to ward off charging bears. I try to encourage this as I am sure I can get to the canoes while the hypothetical bear mauls anyone foolish enough to try to poke it with a stick. There is an alcohol fueled sermon about the evils of high fructose corn syrup and relativism. Another night, a meteor brighter than any I have ever seen skips across the stratosphere, a long poem is recited as the moon rises over Lake Lavielle, and around 4 AM, there is a beautifully succinct five sentence summation of the universe, the details of which, unsurprisingly, cannot be retrieved in the morning. Much is referenced through personal experience: the law of the jungle and convict wisdom, legalese, the last 3000 years of western theater, or me prattling on, mostly ignorantly, about Ethiopia and cultural relativism. Of course, limited by the constraining world of our own concepts, none of us makes much sense to any of the others, but that isn’t new. In between, we try to patch up the gaps in the last 15 years - alternatively amused and horrified at the wear of time. The row through the woods finishes with a 5km portage, providing serious shared suffering, which is perhaps the glue that truly binds.

round 2: washington

One afternoon in Seattle, we visit a drab industrial lake side warehouse, the studio of Dale Chihuly, America’s preeminent glass blower. Only a small part of the warehouse holds kilns, a rainbow wall of glass rods, and a handful of Seattle hipsters blowing Chihuly designed fanciful glass baubles. The rest is room after room playing variations on a theme: sepia toned Native Americans portraits, zigzagging patterned Pendleton rugs, horn o’ plenty cerulean and canary chandeliers, old radios, buddhas, dart boards, accordions. Every wall, art through repetition. Tapping, not so subtly, upon the pattern seeking parts of the brain. A pleasant departure from the Ethiopian preferred bug-eyed Mary, Jesus, or St. George on his white horse sticking the dragon.

In one room tropical fish swim amongst the black lit luminescence of fog colored glass fans and spindles. In another, a brilliantly colored coral glass-bottomed pool. The floor to ceiling mirrored walls echoing the jubilant voices of laughing children and intoxicated adults. One wonder at the happenstance that opens such doors. The fruit of liberal arts colleges - access to places you have no business being.

Meanwhile, further south, preparations for the 4th annual Hootenany have elevated stress levels around the Bee Loud Farm. A stage must be built, a grill put together, kegs and food bought, lighting and sound equipment set up, children watched, much swearing about never again . . . and there must be family fun. Eventually, the disparate strands come together. Old friends, live music, food, fire, and a general carnival of debauchery sustain the farm til dawn. This is the Americana we were looking for

round 3: misery

Back in the MidWest, more America is on tap: Willie Nelson and Neil Young at Farm Aid, a pig roast, KC barbecue, delicious Boulevard beer, and a couple evenings spent on a porch listening to cicadas reo-reoing in the warm August Missouri night with children grown to men like we did 33 years ago.

The moments most appreciated are those where time seems to have stood still: sitting on the couch watching Food TV while Broc ‘works’ from home. Playing ultimate poorly with folks who remember me more fondly than they should. Listening to baseball games on the radio in the gathering twilight with James. Drinking gin and tonics at my parents’ kitchen table. Unfortunately, 'the past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.' Time has not stood still and the hated house is making unrealistic demands on the little bit of now we have left. The rumor is that America is decaying from within, so I guess that my stake in it should be going to hell as well. Plumbers and painters and carpenters o my. Alas, not all is pork and prosperity.

As the plane climbs above the gleaming spires of Chicago, I regret the things not done, people not seen, and things not said. Reminded again that time is the most precious thing we have, but that we too often spend it frivolously waiting for ‘when’. The melancholy of the unbearable lightness of being.

‘Cats in the cradle and the silver spoon, the little boy blue and the man in the moon . . . you know we’ll have a good time then’.

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Comments

[Mom]

Great retrospective on home leave
Loved reading your thoughts about home leave. Sorry there weren\'t more gin & tonics around the kitchen table. :)

[Brian]

its too early to sound so old.