Four Hours before the Day before 75

Paint Brushes as Flowers (21 March 2012)
I should be asleep by now. As I begin this, I have less than four hours to sleep before I begin my travel to Nashville, Tennessee, for my father's seventy-fifth birthday, which is Friday. But I won't get to sleep right away, because I have this small note to finish.

Whenever I am about to travel, I always stay up late. I always find more to work on. I always clean up. I even neatened my excessively need office today before I left. Tonight, I watched a movie, a packed my bags carefully, I made sure I had no bills to pay, and I bought copies, for friends and family, of a couple of books I recently appeared in. Although I've traveled my entire life, and am arguably better at traveling than staying still, I still am a little too anxious to go to sleep at a reasonable hour on the night before a trip.

And I always try to leave behind a home in good order whenever I leave on a trip. My interest in order comes as I set off on a trip. Maybe I want the place to be neat (neater) in case I die on the trip.

I don't know.

In preparation for this trip, I've put together a chronology of my father's life that is over 30 pages long. I don't know how that got so out of control, but that is one thing I worked on tonight. And as I finished with it, I emailed it to myself, so that it would exist even if this computer on my lap is destroyed on the trip. Every trip is an opportunity for disaster. It is a removal from the regular somnolence of life. 

But today, because it is already the day of my trip, I will leave for and arrive in Nashville. (Delta has just reminded me of my flight, so the time is drawing now.) All of my family, the family I grew up with and their children, live around Nashville, Tennessee. I am the only one to have left, the only one to have kept moving. At least for a while.

I haven't been to Tennessee in many years. I don't know how many. I live about 1,000 miles from my family, and I rarely shorten that distance. I've evolved along a different arc than they have. I'm a different kind of person. Once a native Californian, I'm now a northeasterner consternated by the unwinter we have just have.

But I'll see my family, and I'll probably have some fun. My neiphews are great to play with, even the older ones, even the young ones, like Caitlyn and Sean.

It seems almost as if I'm going home. Though I know I left behind the concept of a home to go back to a while ago. The reason you can't go home again is because wherever you return to is never still your home.

Homeless, I fly.


ecr. l'inf.