Going Home
Bill Long 1/11/05
Yes, It's Good to be Back Home Again
Like veins through our bodies, longings for home run through Western literature, music and poetry. Ever since Homer penned the Odyssey, that 20-year journey of Odysseus to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, writers have been thinking and writing about home. In our lifetime John Denver rode to the top of the pop and country charts in the 1970s on his "longing-for-home" singing. Home is a theme, like love, loss, grief and hope, that will never perish from our hearts or our vocabulary.
I was touched by references to home in two poets interviewed by Bill Moyers in The Language of Life. Mary TallMountain spent her first years among her native Athabascan people about 120 miles West of Fairbanks, AK, but then was adopted by a Seattle physician and wife, only returning to her "home" much later in life. Much of her poetry reflects not simply the reality of the Athabascans but the women in her family that rooted her deeply in life.
Quincy Troupe is an African-American poet, a native of St Louis and currently a professor in San Diego. He speaks powerfully about the music of language and the need he has to go back home to be refreshed by the language of his youth. "When I go back to St. Louis," he says, "people come up to me and say 'Quincy' or whatever nickname they called me, and right away I'm back there, and the language that I hear there even now is the language that I grew up listening to (p. 416)."
There is something powerful about the language and experience of "home," whether that concept is imagined as a geographical place (for Troupe) or a place in the mind where certain beloved people are (for TallMountain). Reading their interviews and excerpts from their poetry made me ask the question of where my home is.
My Home
On the one hand the answer to the question is easy. I live in Oregon, where I have lived from 1982-1990 and then again from 1996-today. But Oregon is really not my home. I moved from Connecticut to California in 1967 (at age 15), and my mother still lives in the same community where we moved 38 years ago. As I have been thinking about my understanding of home, I think it is not so much a place (like the community in CA) as in some memories that come through association with my mother and brothers who happen to be in that place. These memories come to focus in one picture/painting, which I would like to describe to you. It only dawned on me recently why this painting bulks so large in my sense of "home."
A Painting
Prominently displayed in my mother's home in CA is a mid-Civil War vintage painting of my great-grandfather's ("Granddaddy Al Lynch") brother (David) at about age 2. Al was born in 1860, David a year or two later, and David died in childhood. Thus, he left no "mark" on the world, no children or wife, no records or letters, no nothing. The painting is the only memory we have of David Lynch. Yet that painting still is in my mother's home 140 years later. When I was a child that painting was in my home in CT, and I used to look often at the picture and think that the child portrayed was a girl. After all, the child's hair was long, and s/he was dressed in what looked like girl's clothing--a long, flowing gown, with breasts that looked like a little girl. So, I remember thinking as a child that this guy was really a girl and that somehow deep in my past I had this guy/girl as a relative.
The painting came with us from CT to CA in 1967 and has remained with my mother since that time. I would not have thought much more about it until a few years ago I was rummaging through some old pictures in CA and I came across a photo from the early 1940s depicting Granddaddy Al and his wife, my great-grandmother, whom I and my brothers called "Gaga" (she lived until 1961). Gaga looked like Auntie Em of the Wizard of Oz in the picture, with her hair in a bun, sitting ramrod-straight in a chair. Al was sitting opposite her in their living room. He died in 1944 and so the photo was taken just a few years before his death.
But as I looked more closely at the photo, I saw the painting of David Lynch hung in the background. The photographer could not have consciously been aware of putting the David Lynch picture in the photo, since the "focus" is on my great-grandparents, but there is was--the same painting that I was looking at five feet away from me in my mother's home in CA was with my great-grandparents in their photo 60 years previously.
Meaning
What that 1940s photo did for me is to tell me that Granddaddy Al always had his deceased brother next to him. Even until Al's declining years, the child David was there, serenely looking down on Al and Gaga, peacefully keeping watch over the family. And then it hit me. It is the child, the one who left nothing, that still watches over our house, that still keeps family together, that still provides a kind of metaphysical "glue" to our lives that nothing else can do. He who lived the shortest life now is the one who links me in 2005 to my great-grandparents in 1940 and, through them, to David himself during the Civil War. Though my family goes back to the 1630s in CT, this photo and painting takes me quickly back more than 1/3 of that long journey.
Thus, where is home for me? It is not necessarily just in a person or a place, but it is suggested to me by the painting of a young child. He tells me that my rootage is deep and fine, that I am loved in a family, that I am firmly fixed to the New England soil. I am so thankful for the way that the child, who never would leave a legacy, has left such a large one for me.
Copyright © 2004-2007 William R. Long |