Leaving Home

The entry that follows was edited on Monday the 10th and posted on Tuesday the 11th but it was composed over the course of the twelve hours between 1100 and 2300 this past Sunday – the 9th.

I write as I sit in the baggage claim area of Indianapolis International Airport. Today is Sunday, March 9th and I’m here waiting for the flight that will take me home to Charleston, South Carolina. It isn’t scheduled to depart until 1800, some six plus hours from now. I’ve chosen the baggage claim area because the airport’s main concourse is crammed with humanity and it’s hard to hear yourself think up there, yet alone sit and write. I was hoping to switch my reservation to an earlier flight, but being as this is spring break week for Perdue, IU, and UI, and being as there was a blizzard through most of this region last night that delayed or canceled flights both here in Indianapolis and at surrounding airports, Indy is now overrun with passengers all hoping to get somewhere – anywhere. And fast!

Oh hell, the buzzer just went off on the baggage carousel here in front of me announcing the arrival of luggage from some recently alighted flight. People are now starting to crowd in hoping to jockey themselves so as to be in the best position to snag their personal belongings. Hopefully they’ll position themselves well, find their items quickly, and leave me to my peace. A group of TSA employees sit side-by-side on the next carousel down each holding their lunch box. Must be shift change.

Ah, there, that’s much better – quiet has returned and it only took twenty minutes.

So why, you may wonder, am I in Indianapolis in the first place? Well, I flew up on Friday to meet my mom and spend some time with my Grandpa Martin (who will be turning ninety in June.) Last fall the family got word that his health was getting the better of him and, if we wanted to see him before he passed away, that we should plan to get out this way soon. This was as soon as I could make the trip a reality. It’s always very easy to find excuses not to do something (bad timing; lack of funds; employment commitments,) but, for some reason, it always seems difficult to find reasons to actually do something – commit to something. The same is true for this trip – there just wasn’t going to be a convenient time and it certainly was going to be difficult financially – even coming up with a little spending cash for food is a big deal right now. But the fact is, if I had gotten a call telling me that Grandpa Martin had passed, I’d feel compelled to drop everything in order to attend his funeral. I’d tell myself how important it was to me to be able to be there and I’d bite the bullet and just go. As I thought about this scenario, I began to realize how selfish it was – it was all about how I’d quell my own guilt and grief without any real thought to my grandfather. It wouldn’t really much matter to him if I would be at his funeral or not – he’d be dead. After all, a funeral really is for the living, not for the dead. It’s about a chance for the living to come to terms with fact that someone they love has passed. Doesn’t it make more sense to pay your respects to someone who’s still alive rather than after they’ve died? Why is it that we’ll rearrange our lives to pay respect to the departed yet we often don’t feel compelled to do the same in order to visit the living?

OK, so now I’ve changed locations – I’m sitting at the gate with a bag of Grandpa Martin’s homemade Cracker Jack sitting next to me. He insisted I take it with me. Well….truth be told….maybe I offered to finish if off for him – he is a diabetic after all and I’m not…oh, wait…maybe I am. Anyway, there is nothing in this world that’s packaged in a waxy cardboard box that comes anywhere close to the Cracker Jack my grandfather makes – his is made with ninety years of experience and a lot of love. And just to make this batch a little better, he dumped a bowl of mixed nuts and chocolate chunks into the bag. It’s a venerable cornucopia of blood sugar elevating goodness. I am sworn to make sure I save at least a little for my kids to try. That request may end up being the hardest part of this trip.

So here I sit, in an airport gateway on a cold Sunday afternoon with a bunch of time to kill - time to sit, and reflect, and ponder. I’m headed home. Home to my family who I haven’t seen in over forty-eight hours and who I miss very much. Home to South Carolina where I live and work and have done so for the last two and a half years. Home to the few close friends I’ve made locally and to all my worldly possessions – be they what they may. In short, home to my home. Why then do I feel like I’m leaving home? Why do I feel as though I’m about to board a plane and once again leave the only place on God’s green earth where I truly feel at home? Why do I already feel homesick and I haven’t even left the ground (and wont for at least another two hours?) Why have I already started yearning for the day I can return? Why does Frankfort, Indiana have such a hold on me? And why does it give me such a sense of place; a sense of belonging? I’ve never lived in Frankfort. Well, there was that one summer back in the late ‘60s when I let my hair grow long, wore a lot of paisley, and outwore my welcome bunking on Grandma and Grandpa Martin’s front porch (and for anyone trying to do the math – yes, I was four.)

Now I’ve jumped cities. I took a break from writing to eat something and then stared out the window for a while and did some people watching. A fire truck, ambulance, and police cruiser drove up to meet the incoming flight at the next gate over. It turns out that an elderly lady had to be transported to the hospital upon arrival. That was an interesting spectacle to waist some time gawking at for a while. Before I knew it, it was time to board the plane. I sat next to a young man headed to Philadelphia. “Philadelphia?” I said, “Oh I know that airport well. I haven’t been downtown in many years, but I’ve gotten quite familiar with the airport.” He just smiled and stuck in his iPod earphones – I did the same. Now I’m sitting in Cincinnati, a city I don’t think I’ve ever been to before and an airport I know I’ve never had the honor of visiting. Cincinnati was one of the cities hit hard by yesterday’s blizzard. The runways were all clear when we landed but the taxiways are still covered with slush and ice. And the departure boards in the commuter terminal I now find myself trapped in are littered with delays and cancellations. We left Indy on schedule and made great time flying here, but I have the sneaky suspicion that I’ll be here for a while – might as well make myself comfortable.

So, back to Frankfort. I think one of the reasons I feel such a connection to that town is that it has been one of the few constants in my life. Its one location that has never changed – both in the fact that it is very similar to how I remember it as a child and in the fact that it is where Grandma and Grandpa Martin have always lived. No matter where I’ve lived (twelve different locations that I can recall – and some more that I don’t,) Frankfort has always been a place to return to. If you ask me where I was raised, I’ll tell you that most of my younger years were spent in Pennsylvania. This was the time between six and sixteen years old. Probably the majority of my “growing up” was done at that house out in Palm. But I can’t go back there – there is no family homestead to return to. There might be someone around the area who knows me – more likely someone who knew my parents – but there isn’t anything for me to go to there. No place to drag the kids back to for Christmas or Thanksgiving with the family. Oh sure, I could go visit the area; stay in a hotel. But it wouldn’t be going home. There was a short stint when I lived in Connecticut and then I ended up on Cape Cod. I spent about twenty five years on the Cape and have a lot of good friends and great memories of that place, but it’s also not my home. At least not in the sense of having “roots” in a place or of having the feeling that a place helps define who you are. My kids, who were six and eleven when we moved, will likely feel more of a connection to the Cape than I ever will. I’d return in a heartbeat to see friends and family but I don’t have a need to go back to the “place.” And as for South Carolina, well I’ve never felt quite so out of place as I do here.

Damn, my flight has been delayed again. As of right now, our departure has been pushed back at least an hour. If I’m lucky I’ll get out of here before midnight.

Reading back over what I’ve written here, it would be easy to mistake this epistle as my lamenting a lonely “homeless” existence. Quite the contrary – I’m very happy to have reaffirmed my connection to a place. Frankfort, Indiana and my grandparents define who I am as a whole person more than any other single place I’ve ever lived. If I ever got to a point in my life when I had to go “home,” Frankfort is where I’d go. Besides, the breaded tenderloins are to die for.

Post Script – I did finally make it home Sunday night. I flew into Charleston almost exactly twelve hours after I walked through the door in Indy. Only about two hours of that time was actually spent in the air. When I walked in the door of the house I said, “It’s good to be home.” And I meant it. For right now at least, home is where my family is but not necessarily where I live. It was good to go home for a while, but now it’s good to be back home. Does that make sense?

If The Shoe Fits

We just got back from buying Noah some new sneakers. Last night, while I was reading to him as I do most school nights, Mel came in to say goodnight and discovered that his sneakers had become quite worn. So today we ran over to – I hate to say it – Wal-Mart to buy some sneakers and see if they might have some flip-flops for Zoë. Now I’ve ruminated in the past on the evils of Wal-Mart and I still feel that way for the most part, but when you’re scarping by and barely making ends meet, it’s really hard to ignore the savings realized at that place. As I looked around at the vastness of our particular big box, I remembered a short essay I wrote way back in the early history of Southern Transplant. I also realized how many truly unattractive people are at Wal-Mart, on both sides of the counter. Or maybe it’s just that there are a lot of really unattractive people in South Carolina and they just congregate at Wal-Mart - sort of a Club-Med for ugly people. Anyway, I recycled some old material here for you (something I imagine will happen numerous times in the future,) and freshened it up with a little original material at the end. It doesn’t reek too badly.

We went to one of those Mega Wal-Mart things the other day (or maybe it was Kmart, I don’t remember.) I have never seen so much food in one place before in my life. Where does all this stuff come from? I stood at the end of one aisle and two rows of snacks extended down beyond my vision. How many cans of Pringles have to be in any one place at any one time for the world to rotate? More importantly, has there ever been a time in history when someone needed to buy that many Pringles at once. And then, how exactly would you transport them all? Ironically, I was looking for some sour cream of the fat-free variety (an oxymoron in itself, I know,) but when I got to the dairy section (“You take the main aisle down about ¼ mile and get off at the pork rind end-cap, then stay to the left or you’ll end up in the cheese lane.”) I found that there were three huge empty shelves, but no fat-free sour cream. Ah, ha! I thought. Someone is at home right now making huge batches of fat-free onion dip for some big southern party thing that no one bothered to tell us about (they don’t tell northerners anything around here.) I grabbed a sour cream of the full-fat variety and ran! I don’t want to be around when they remember they forgot to get all those Pringles!

Ah, it’s amazing how well 90mg of prednisone a day will do as a muse.

As for our trip today, we were in search of shoes which are kept in a department buried in the back. Not quite a ¼ mile trek, but close – you take a right at the pork rinds instead of a left. We found the aisle with Noah sized sneakers and began our search. Mel found some camouflaged ones and pointed Noah toward them. “You might as well look for a size one if you can find it,” she said. Up to now, he’s been wearing size 13 youth shoes and she figured he might as well go bigger. I mean, it’s not like his feet are getting any smaller. Noah found a pair that he thought was really cool until he realized they were tie shoes. You see, Noah has made it to the grand old age of eight without ever leaning how to tie his shoes. Velcro is a wonderful thing but it has a tendency to wreak havoc with the acquisition of knot tying skills. When Noah noticed this obvious oversight by the shoe’s manufacturer, he quickly slid them back into their place. Knot tying is one of the skills we worked on in Cub Scouts this year so I took this opportunity to point out the fact that he wouldn’t be able to advance to Webelos next year if he didn’t learn to tie his shoes. Not a complete truth, but a useful misdirection at the time. “Oh, I guess so,” he said as he slid the box back off the shelf. He then searched for a place to sit and try them on. He slid off his old shoes and put on what, compared to the ones he had just removed, looked to me like shoes big enough for a clown. There were obviously too big for him but he slipped them on. “Oooo…,” he said, “These are too tight. They’re too small.” “How can that be?” I asked. I looked at his feet and the shoes looked plenty big enough. I asked him if there was any paper stuffed in the shoes. “No.” “Maybe you need to pull up your socks,” I suggested, “Maybe the socks have become bunched at the toes.” “Oh,” said Noah as he sat down and pulled off the shoes, “Maybe it’s because I have three pairs of socks on.” Um……ya think? At this point Mel rounded the corner and explained that Noah likes to sleep with his socks on (something I could never do no matter how cold I am,) and in the morning when he’s getting dressed he pulls the clean socks on over the dirty ones from the day before. In this case, being Wednesday, he was wearing three days worth of socks. Wednesday’s were over Tuesday’s which were over Monday’s. Eeew, gross! So I pealed off the two extra layers of hosiery and left Noah with his beginning of the week stockings. He then reapplied the footwear and stood up. “Do they still feel tight?” I asked knowing full well the answer. “No” was his simple reply. Gee, I wonder why. I rolled each of the two extra pairs of socks and stuck them in the small pockets of Noah’s sweat pants. He looked like an Oompa Loompa walking through the store. The cool camouflage sneakers are now part of the Hofmann inventory.

Hope everyone is happy and healthy.

The Blond Test

This morning at breakfast, Zoë announced that she was going to administer the Blond Test to each of us. This is apparently one of those middle school quizzes that kids ask each other. When I was in middle school, we used to predict each other's future via a similar test. In our game, you would draw a large square on a piece of paper. Each side of the square would be divided up into four parts. We would then ask the person whose future we were predicting to give us four places. These would be written down one side of the square. A second side would get four types of cars. The third side would get the names of four girls (or boys, depending on your preference.) And the fourth would get the letters M, A, S, and H. These would stand for mansion, apartment, shack, and house. The predictor would then start to draw a slow spiral in the middle of the square and ask the predictee to say “stop.” Once this happened, the predictor would count the number of lines in the spiral and use this to count off around the square eliminating options as they were landed on. Eventually, you’d end up with a name, a car, a place, and a domicile – thus predicting the person’s fate. Zoë’s quiz was intended to determine whether or not you were a “Blond” – meaning ditzy (with all due apologies to you natural blonds out there.) Her test, like mine, involved drawing a diagram on paper and having the test taker fill it in. After breakfast, Zoë grabbed some paper and started laying out the test for Mel to take. She got the diagram drawn and then, without really thinking about what she was saying, blurted out, “How do you spell blond?” Um Zoë, I think you just failed your own test. We gave her a hard time for that one.

Footnote – after Mel, Zoë and I argued it for a while, I had to do some research to find out if blond had an e at the end or not. Turns out, both spellings are acceptable, but blonde is usually used as a feminine noun while blond is usually used as an adjective. I guess we all failed the test. Oh well.

Go Patriots.