Road Trippin', Part 2

Waking up bright and early to the crack of sunshine peeking into my hotel room through the slightly parted curtains, after an unusually restful night of sleep, I was ready to continue my journey across the Midwest.  Somehow, I viewed this trip as less of an ends-justify-the-means excursion necessitated by the considerable distance between Dallas and St. Louis, and saw it more as the first part of my long-awaited vacation (hence all the random roadside stuff from yesterday).  Still, it was kind of hard to pull myself out of that king-sized bed with the extra-comfy sheets (Hampton Inns know their bed linens)...but after a leisurely breakfast of biscuits with jelly and cartoons (yes, I am 23, thank you for asking), I hit the road again.

Once again, I discovered the wonderful ability of audiobooks to minimize the monotonous lull of boredom that the plains of Oklahoma are capable of producing.  Getting into the story, it felt like no time at all before I made it to Springfield, MO...even if my eyes were burning and my head was pounding from driving virtually non-stop for three and a half hours.  Pulling into the parking lot of a local Wal-Mart, I was excited to see my friend Ashley as she arrived to pick me up and take me to lunch.  Ashley is one of my friends from middle school, with whom I continue to maintain a strong friendship despite the fact that we only attended school together for one year, ten years ago.  Anyway, she lives in Springfield now, and since I pass right through Springfield, we made plans to go to lunch.

This was possibly the best plan we've ever come up with.  

Usually, my road-trip stops include rest stops and fast food - the kinds of stops designed to take a minimal amount of time and get you back on the road as soon as possible (thereby not providing much real "rest").    But, armed with the excuse of having lunch with an old friend, I took a good two and a half hour break.  That's a REAL rest stop.  Ashley took me to this family-owned Italian restaurant called Bambinos, which is hidden away in the middle of an old neighborhood and which serves up a FANTASTIC Greek pasta - penne, feta cheese, some fancy Greek olive, spinach, roasted red pepper.  And bread with olive oil.  I love places that let me dip bread in olive oil.  After a great lunch and great conversation, we went and got frozen custard at Andy's (a favorite of Springfield-ites, so I'm told), where I ordered a "small" peanut butter and brownie concrete mixture, but it was really the size of a generous medium soda.  In true frozen-custard-establishment style, we sat on the curb leaning against the building, eating our ice cream and dodging bugs and laughing and talking about our lives.  It was all fantastic.  But, of course, all good things must come to an end, and eventually I bid Ashley goodbye and hit the road again for the remaining three hours to my family's home in St. Louis suburbia.

The rest of the trip passed uneventfully.  I listened to the audiobook the whole way (pretty sure audiobooks are my new favorite thing), and eventually made it back.  Something did hit me as I approached my family's home, though - Missouri is beautiful.  Really.  It's gorgeous.  Driving up through the twisting hills, covered in leafy forests with glimpses of valleys flashing between the trees, I realized that I grew up in a beautiful place.  My childhood home is in the suburbs, certainly, but on the edge of the suburbs.  These hills, I realized, are like a part of me...just seeing them, and driving through them, is like my past embracing me as I return for a brief visit.  Even though it was hot and humid, I rolled down my window as I drove through the twisty stretches of Highway 100 through Grey Summit, I extended my left arm to its full length out the window, feeling the hot air pushing back at me.  And I felt that intriguing dichotomy that is the present come over me, that focus on the future that is inextricably tied to the past.  We live our entire lives in the present, and yet the presents become pasts and the future is nothing more than a series of presents that have yet to be lived.  And we fight our way forward, surrounded by our hopes and our memories like I was surrounded by those hills, pushing against obstacles just as my arm cut tirelessly through the air as I sped down the road.

And as I arrived home, fully cognizant of my past and enthralled with the possibilities of my future, I found myself happy to be in a place where time comes together, where past and present meld together and the promise of the future shines brightly out of the corner of my eye.  

Home is an Odd Phenomenon.

I am SUPER happy to be home.  I want to get that out in the open right away.  But every time I come home, for the first few days, it's kind of weird.

For one thing, it just feels small.  Maybe it's because I know each and every corner and back road and intersection in the general area, or maybe it's because most things manage to look exactly the same as they  did when I left them, or maybe it's because there's less cars and the roads and buildings are smaller than Dallas.  But it feels small.  And I feel like I'm bigger than this town now.

For another thing, being back home is like taking a trip back to the past.  This is good for the nostalgia quotient, but it also has this weird ability to recall otherwise well-buried memories, emotions, or conflicts to the surface, whether good or bad.  In the case of the latter, I often get upset or angry about things that I thought I'd moved past.  I then end up replaying an assortment of cathartic YouTube videos (today it was Glee's version of Rolling in the Deep) and playing melancholy tunes on my old violin or the family piano (today it was "Weep No More You Sad Fountains" by Patrick Doyle).  And eventually I get over it, generally by going to bed or getting together with an old friend.

Thirdly, I'm worlds more confident here than I am in my normal life.  This might be because of the familiarity of everything, or it might be because I fancy myself to be a sophisticated young woman who went off to "the big city" to do "big things"...but somehow I just feel a lot more awesome than usual when I'm out and about. 

In summary, being home is weird.

Out of these three points, I think it's the second one that really gets me.  I mentioned yesterday that my bedroom is essentially "frozen in time", and it is.  Literally every object in this room tells a story, from my grandfather's childhood French textbook, to the caps, honor cords, and diplomas of two graduations, to the plastic leis I wore at my 8th grade dance.  There are the nesting dolls I've had since before I can remember, the pressed flowers I picked with my Dad in middle school and arranged in a picture frame, the gold microphone my friend Lucy gave me last year.  There is the collection of dried roses on my shelf - received in times of sisterhood, of sadness, and of hope.  Even the remaining unpacked boxes from my undergraduate years whisper quietly of a period of my life that still remains largely unpacked, its contents still waiting to be fully integrated into my present life.  Surrounded by so many things, I'm faced not just with the day-to-day of my present life...but with my life.

All of my dreams, all of my goals, all of my life started from here.  I think of my childhood self, of my adolescent desires and concerns, and I think about my present life, and it is the weirdest thing in the world to think about how my past-self knew nothing of my present.  The quiet six year-old afraid to talk to people had no idea that she would speak French one day.  The twelve year-old misfit on the outskirts of Sunday School would never have contemplated a career in ministry, much less children's/youth ministry (the current post-masters plan).  The seventeen year-old hoping desperately to be asked to prom knew nothing of the other loves (and losses) that would cross her path.  And even now, sitting on the same bed where I dreamed my earliest dreams, does my twenty-two year-old self know anything about what is going to come in the rest of her life?

Let's be serious about this: we can plan all we want, we can get all the degrees we want...but in the end, none of us really know what is going to happen.  I have this tendency to think of my life in terms of my past, sometimes positively in the form of maintaining relationships with people, but sometimes negatively, by boxing myself into what I have been, and worrying that, because I haven't been a certain thing yet in my life, there's no way I could be that thing in the future.  But the future is a wide open space that literally anything can fall into...why consider it in terms of the past?

I think home, for me, is kind of like a trampoline - the higher I jump, the more surprised I am to find myself back at the starting point.  But eventually I launch away from home again, higher each time.  Take away home, though, take away the past, and you crash.  The past must be remembered, acknowledged, and learned from...but it also must be left behind to reach new and exciting heights.

Still, it's always a bit weird to hit that trampoline...and it's always a bit weird to step back into the past, for however brief a time.