If you drive 15 minutes east out of Baton Rouge on I-12 (20 if its rush hour) and take a right on 16 you will find yourself heading south, through sprawling country suburbs. There in these shakily rural parts, in a new subdivision of some 500 identical houses, lives my brother. Down about 15 more miles is "The Camp", where my brother and I just spent the weekend swimming, drinking, fishing.
I’ve stayed late at my brother’s house tonight to clean up, because it is here that I have had most of my belongings crammed for the last year—in closets, bookshelves, the attic, against the wall of his extra bedroom. This evening I slowly inventory each the plastic tubs I packed my heritage into last May. I spent the last year of my life without them in Ohio, forgetting them, being an intern with no time outside of work to reflect. Now it surges back and I step away to write.
My first order of business is to put on a CD. I choose one I made at the end of a relationship in my final semester of college. It is not hard to remember some of the destruction of that time, the loss of self, the false hopes, all bound by mere abstractions of musical notes and harmonies. I wrote on the compact disc a forceful “Be Here Now”. It's a command that testifies to the desperation I felt as I groped for companionship and solidarity in those confused months and years of poetry and 24 hour diners.
At first, going through my belongints is empowering. After some time of having no one that recognizes me for my past lives, I finally remember myself. I was a powerhouse, I say to myself. I took on the world from many fronts, an ambitious cartographer of the new world outside of small and homely Livingston where I grew up. I lived in Germany for a year!
The CD book encompasses the range of an entire era, from the beginnings of compact discs (early teenage years) to its digital demise (post-college), my growing up on the cusp of a wave of information and sound. I was enthralled by music as a boy. Saturated, mind and soul. I was a musician once. The CDs tell stories of those exploits, of intimate friends and their mix tapes, places I lived, nights spent at house shows in smoky living rooms. Spaces. The music brings me back through an era of personal enlightenment, of moving out. I remember visiting the library alone in my silver Ford Taurus, where I borrowed Van Morrison’s St. Dominick’s Preview. The pleasures of shared resources. Some CDs I bought as they were released and I begin trying to piece the years together, moving from town to city to oversees. Seeing these old objects that I’ve owned since childhood, I begin to see my life in third person.
And how time promises us the riches of persistent work! If I had a home it would be a magnificent one, walls filled with books, relics, paintings, music. On the walls would be photographs of the great people I’ve met, people who seem to me now like giants, movie stars, fabled characters in an old, old story. These things remind me of my journeys and the homes I've left behind. Now, it is difficult letting go of even the smallest pamphlet or receipt, for in each is the reflection of a place where I am no longer.
But I cannot fool myself: it is a sad occasion for me. Sorting through the wealth of my former life in college, reflecting on my past productivity and creative drive, I realize that I have lost as much as I have gained. The many embellishments I accumulated only remind me: kitchen sets, tools, oil paints, portfolios. I once had a home, furniture, and rooms to put them in. I had a community that was beginning to know me. Since I moved to Ohio, I’ve given many things away in an attempt to make myself more mobile. My first electric guitar and drum set stay with my little brother. A colleague now has my beer brewing equipment. Now I am the wanderer I was afraid of becoming--homeless, estranged, an out-of-towner. Despite the sense that I have slowed down and am closer than ever to settling down, I’m still traveling.
Now I’m attempting to bring most of it to Ohio in my small 91 Ford Ranger. Certainly, it will not all fit. The filing cabinet, with its paper trail leading back through Quebec and Germany into late pubescent poetry of highs school, will not. The collection of beer glasses—tulips, weizens, pilsners, and pub glasses neatly wrapped in newspaper—would never survive. Is this even possible? It won't work; I need two trucks. But how can I possibly go another year with all this boxed away?
On the floor of Joey’s cluttered guest bedroom and living room, I separate the groups, list them, trying to ask myself what I don’t need, what I can fit in my truck. Now in the office, I make my lists.
My brother enters to look through more photo albums. Since Dad passed away he has been putting together photographs from the camp from the 80s and 90s, childhood pictures, that special light. He has been compulsively ordering and filing them but now has started putting them wherever he finds room. He points to later pictures, reminds me of my silly facial hair, the hibiscus Aloha shirts, the blazer phase: places I can’t remember being anymore. Times when Mom and Dad were both alive; times when people were around and I took for granted their presence, their own wealth of experiences. “Look,” Joey says. “You after you came back from Germany.” I see myself momentarily as he must have, as the rest of the family surely did. Our beloved, dreaming child, the runaway.
I feel all things at once. It’s hard now to share this gratitude that is, in places, years late. Soon I will have to begin studying for the GRE again. Planning my next step. What is next? Grad School? Work? When will I get back to this place, back to the exhilaration I felt as a child, sailing across the landscape in the back of my fathers pickup? When I will get back to that feeling of home? When will I be finished?
