Home Stretch

A few weeks ago we were picking up pizza at the Janesville Pizza Factory when a young couple with a baby approached us and said, in effect, "hello, you are a young couple with a baby, let's have dinner together." And so, after some delay to allow the family waters to rise and recede, we did: a mellow meal of split-pea barley soup, tofu-balls and freshbaked pecan sourdough shared on the deck amid the howls of 5-month Zella and the porcine grunts of 11-month Snockelpea, all sharpened and clarified by the clean grassy smell left by an afternoon thunderstorm.

Kindred souls are rare and wonderful things. Strangely, kindred souls in remote locations seem to be no rarer that their counterparts in the heavily populated regions (though they are just as wonderful.) Whether this phenomenon is a reflection on us or on humanity is a question I'm probably not qualified to answer: true, I tend to like the sorts of loners, individualists, do-it-yourselfers, and back-to-the-landers that you find in the dark heart of rural America, but I would hardly say that my friend-circle is limited to this class of people (consider my wife....) Perhaps then there really is some Law of Thermodynamics that governs the distribution of kindred tastes, an aggregate statistics dictating the equidistribution of Like and Dislike.

Whatever it is, these people rocked: they were the kind of people we'd like to be if we had more time to work at it.

It is unfortunate, of course, that we met them the week before we were to leave. Not just because it would have been great to spend more time with them, but also because they could have given us a better sense of what it might be like to try to build a life in these parts. This is a relevant issue, especially now, in the last few days of our sojourn, as we find ourselves spending a little more time each night on the back deck watching the sun go down, trying to soak a little more of the spirit of this place into our bones, our senses, so that when we return to the Burgh, it will still burn within us, and we can think clearly about the Next Step.

A precipitous move to Janesville? On the heels of a summer like this one, the idea does not seem so farfeteched. Still, something holds us back, something that is not about careers or money or networks, but some basic question about how to invest a life, how and when to tie yourself to a chunk of land and a group of people, how to throw down roots and build up homes and etch out identities. None of these questions have easy answers, but seeing other people, about our age and in about our circumstances, seeing them in action struggling to find these these things out: this is a rich and rare discovery, and one I would very much like to have pushed further.

Five more days in the mountains. Then a few days on the coast and we're off, back to the Burgh, 'America's Most Livable City', as Dean Labriola liked to cackle on about before keeling over of that spring-term pneumonia that found such fertile ground on the soot-sodden lungs of a Pittsburgh Lifer. Not a bad place in its way, especially as viewed from far away: it is the city in which Benjamin was conceived, and born, and will turn one in less than a month. It is the city in which, for the first time in my life, I've Professed. It is also the city in which I've discovered my mixed appetite for teaching, and in which my heart hardened to the ugly truths of formal academic productions, and, further afield, in which I finally understood who loses, and how, when the planet gets ripped apart for material and industrial ends, and how economic inequalities degrade a place, and segregation gets so entrenched there's no way to root it out, even when its underlying causes are long dead and the new regime is the sort of mild academic liberalism which one expects to be the total opposite of such a state.

It is important to remember that the world has problems, and those problems need solutions. A part of life is taking care of yourself: thinking about your food sources, your kid's college fund, your retirement. But in the midst of the bosco oscuro, I find it useful to remember that if I can't solve my own problems, perhaps I can solve someone else's. And that to do that, it might be useful to take our new friends' ansatz as paradigm, something along the lines of "hello, you are a humanoid, I am a humanoid, let's have dinner." After all, in less than a month we'll be the prime custodial units of a one year old: if now isn't the time to start thinking about what kind of home, what kind of world we want for that boy, when is?