October 13, 2002:
The feeling that I have no home.
Recurring dream. I'm walking home from the park. A short walk, just a couple of blocks. Vibrant imagery, perfectly accurate, from cracks in the sidewalk underfoot to the pastel colors of the homes across the street. On the right the grammar school playground behind its tall chain-link fence. Cross Dakota Drive to the apartment complex. Cross the alley, up a short grass embankment, between rows of identical two-story buildings. Past my bedroom window. Two steps up another short embankment to the wide patio before our front door. The key's in my pocket. Check the mail, open the door. Cheap green chairs, Danish Modern lamps. We lived there twenty years.
Visited the old neighborhood in 1998. Had been a very long time, more than ten years, surely. Deterioration. Used to joke that it was company housing, but, that was true: with the closure of the General Dynamics plant, the neighborhood had decayed. Paint peeling on the pastel houses; the huge apartment complex broken into three smaller businesses. Most visibly the grammar school had been privatized: it's now the French-American School, something like that. They don't use the huge playground: there are tumbleweeds blowing there in the sand, like a Wild West ghost town.
We moved there when I was half way through third grade. I loved the Beatles. Margaret, eight-year-old love interest, played Rubber Soul for me for the first time. Her favorite was "Run For Your Life." Her Navy father called her "Mig." I had the third-longest hair in the school, and was very proud. The longest belonged to Mike Ketteringham, who taught me what a communist was. We were playing four-square on the blacktop. "Serve to me or you're a communist!," he said. Gotcha. In the big sand field I played with ring magnets, collecting iron filings into little bags carefully sifted, then using the magnets to build complex patterns of filings poured on paper towels - a form of art. Somebody gave me a bicycle odometer, the kind that you mount near the wheel, with a gear driven by a small dowel you mount on a spoke. He told me to try to spin it all the way around to zero. I still have that: it's at about 8,000 of 9,999, I think.
My sense of homelessness began there. They sent me to school across town. From that time I was never in the right place. At school I was the lower class kid from the apartment complex; at home, the egghead who went to the special school. Wherever I was, was wrong. Wasn't until college that that neighborhood became home. Summers in the park in the sun, reading Perry Anderson, Althusser, Joyce, Freud. Maybe a place is "home" because the important experiences happen there.
In that apartment I had sex of one flavor or another with most of the lovers who've been important in this life. In the recurring walking dreams one in particular sometimes is there.
Later when my mother moved away, I felt that some sense of spiritual connection was broken. Some part of my life stayed in that apartment, like an echo of those core events. It's that piece of myself which draws me there in dreams, now, I think.
Watched some of the Beatles' Anthology videos this weekend. But, it was difficult. It's painful to see them so old. In my soul they're forever twenty-something, always fresh-faced, always as they were when they arrived in my life and changed it. Like she is.