Nearly two decades ago, in a tiny town in middle-of-nowhere Mississippi, I packed all of my worldly possessions into a then-new Mustang, backed down a driveway buckling in the August heat, and left.
Lots of people who’ve done such things–who’ve left behind lives and families in Middle America to pursue careers or education or dreams in cities across the nation–will try to convince you that they’d give up everything to return to their roots. They’ll be tossing back an $18-a-glass Beaujolais, waiting for their edamame to cool, and then bust out with statements like, “Hell yeah, I’m just a country boy at heart!”
Ladies and gentlemen, those words will never cross my lips.
I mean, sure: I spent a good chunk of my childhood fishing and running through woods and planting vegetable gardens, and I look back fondly on all that, but I’m pretty good and distinguishing between nostalgia and straight-up yearning. I wax nostalgic when I remember riding four-wheelers for hours in the cold, then shuffling into my grandmother’s house and smelling her incomparable blueberry cobbler, fresh from the oven; I yearn for a personal assistant who can draft a decent thank-you letter and for a computer that doesn’t groan every time I try to run InDesign and Photoshop at the same time. Which basically means I understand that my hometown is a great place to visit, but until they 86 the fagbashing and build a good Thai restaurant, I wouldn’t want to live there. Again.
All of this was thrown into sharp relief two days ago when I walked into my daddy’s house and the first thing he said to me was, “We’re gonna have to wait dinner on your brothers. They went up to the farm for some deer hunting and probably won’t be back for another hour or so. I got some ambrosia in the fridge if you’re hungry, though.” It all sounded so completely foreign to me–but not in an attractive, exotic way. Just foreign. Like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what it’s like here.” Later, I tried to have extended conversations with my family without bringing up politics, religion, or social issues, which basically left us with cars, golf, and my estranged mother (who merits a post of her own). I’ve never been so happy to see my grumpy boyfriend or my incontinent dogs as I was when I returned last night.
So, yeah, I freely admit that I’ve lost touch with Middle America. But then, they’ve lost touch with me, too, so I’m not taking all the blame.
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