Jiggity Pig
Home again, home again
Last week I visited home for the first time since Christmas of 2019. For me, home is Indianapolis, although the longer that I spend away, the harder it becomes to imagine ever coming back for more than a handful of days. I don’t hate the city exactly—I lived there from ages 1 to 22, and very rarely traveled until after, so that my whole concept of placeness is largely based on Indy and its weird, half-planned, immemorable sprawl—but most of the things that I like about it are available elsewhere. If my family left, and if Tracy’s family did too, I might never go there again, except possibly to visit Butler University, my alma mater.
The worst thing by far about Indianapolis is going from Point A to Point B. Getting anywhere takes at least half an hour, the drivers are reckless, and traffic jams are common but unpredictable. I find driving there to be only slightly less frightening than being driven there by other people; in my brief visit, we nearly hit an unexpected scooter, could easily have been hit by several cars, and watched idiot children on three-wheeled motorcycles careen through traffic, passing cars on two-lane roads not so much because they could as because no one had killed them yet. Here’s hoping that nobody does.
There’s no reason COVID should have changed any of this, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by how exactly the same it all was. Were I still a local, I’m sure I could have named a dozen changes caused by the pandemic: failed restaurants, new businesses—actually, maybe that’s it. The number of people we lost, and the number that we will lose yet, is unacceptably high, but I don’t personally know many of those people, whether in Indianapolis or Iowa City. The only person I would say I lost during quarantine was my grandfather, and he died of something else, at a normal age, in a hospice, more or less intentionally, after a prolonged sickness, and following my grandmother—his wife. I am not unmoved by the tertiary connections that I have to people killed by COVID, but we don’t talk about them. They surface in my consciousness solely in the form of myself reminding me, in moments like this, that they do exist, or anyway they did.
In some ways my family has changed quite a lot since the last time I saw them in person. There is the death that I already mentioned, but there is also my mother’s new marriage, and other good news that is not mine to share. But we are at heart the same people. I stayed up past 2 AM having more or less the same conversations with my mother that we have been having for years. When we go to restaurants, as we did on Wednesday, June 16th, my 35th birthday, we still say the same things, still eat the same foods. The place that we went, George’s Neighborhood Grill, serves fried mushrooms that my mother raves about—they appeared to be her favorite food, as they were before the pandemic, and as they may well remain for some years to come. There’s no reason COVID should change that.
The homes of our youth are so resistant to change that we see them when we look at other, entirely different structures. For most of my childhood, my family lived in apartments. The one that I remember most clearly (which is to say, the one that I haven’t completely forgotten) was part of a complex called Timber Falls, which may or may not have since been rebranded as “Timber Point”—I could find out by asking my mom, but there is a particular pain that I feel browsing the pictures on the Timber Point website, a stabbing sort of almost-recognition, that makes me feel defensive of my guess. I don’t want to find out that I’m not actually remembering those things. Timber Falls was not considered a nice neighborhood, but it seemed nice to me. Our apartment (we called it a “townhouse”) had two floors and two bedrooms, and I remember that I liked to crawl up and down the stairs on hands and knees, and that I liked the little landing at the top of those stairs, from which one could enter my room and my sister’s, the bathroom, or my parents’ room. I think that I even liked the brown carpet. When I think of an apartment, which writing fiction often requires, I have to actively remind myself to imagine anything else.
My parents paid for a house to be built in a brief interval of relative stability and affluence. This is the place where my mother still lives. The floorplan is subtly strange though undeniably efficient, placing three bedrooms and two bathrooms about as well as one could ask, arranged around the kernel of a living room with a pleasantly high ceiling and a kitchen/dining room with exactly enough square footage for comfortable cooking and a full dinner table. The kitchen is divided from the living room by a half wall; I wouldn’t quite call it an open concept, but this does have the benefit of making modest spaces seem more generous and spacious than they are. I lived there from something like the ages of 11 to 21. When I close my eyes and imagine a home, this is what I see. The interior has actually changed significantly in recent years, owing to a divorce and the aforementioned marriage; my mother’s new husband is handy and enjoys making improvements. One might think I would resent these alterations, but in truth I can’t quite see them—for example, while I know that some of the carpet in the home has been replaced with tiles, I can’t remember whether the original, long-damaged linoleum remains in the kitchen. I am trying to recall; I’m failing.
Over the last year, when I thought of going home, I imagined hugging my family. This, I felt certain, would be a source of catharsis even if nothing else was. We’re not big on hugs, collectively, but we aren’t down on them either. They happen. I figured that there would be something essentially different about the post-COVID hug, some kind of extra power, a special relief. I don’t remember how many times we did hug before I left, but in each case I held on a little bit longer than I usually would, and longer than my mother or my sister expected, insisting that we somehow mark the significance of the occasion. I hugged my sister long and hard enough that she briefly lifted me off the floor, maybe half an inch. Still there was the sense of sameness, much more powerful than any impression of change.
I’m glad that I hugged them of course, I’m glad that I saw them, but I must admit that this pervasive sameness is starting to make me feel like I’ve lost my mind. I need to see the fact of what we’ve lived through in the lives that we are living now, but by and large I do not. I can’t. It feels as if I’m not allowed.
The stubbornness of home, of routine, of familiar places and people and objects may account for much of our collective refusal to acknowledge the ways that we have been living since March of last year. It may be that for most people, a return to normalcy is not only satisfying but the highest possible aspiration. Maybe there’s no reason that COVID should have changed anything at all. I’ve experimented with believing these things, but I can’t quite make them work.
To me, the reassertion of normalcy appears to be a political project, the collective work product of several overlapping forces of conservatism in American public life. There is after all a significant minority of people who, following Donald Trump’s lead, have spent the entire pandemic behaving as if acknowledging its existence is a personal affront to them and their chosen strongman. There are also the antivaxxers (not all of them politically right-leaning in a conventional sense, though in many cases they do make strong arguments for the explanatory power of the horseshoe theory) who can’t admit the scale of COVID’s damage because doing so would make it all too obvious that they are obligated to get the damn shots. There are also the employers and members of the management classes who are desperate to see us return to the schedules and org charts that had far firmer holds on us before the pandemic raised its existential questions. These are the folks who worry that unemployment benefits have been too generous, that workers are no longer starving enough to work for the table scraps that are their due. This latter set saw the brief surges of federal generosity allowed under Trump in the name of his reelection, and they see the financial family support imagined by draft legislation created by right-wing leaders like Mitt Romney, and these things panic them. By demanding safety measures, opportunities to work from home, and financial support from the government, we acted out in collective self-defense, behaving for once as if we valued our own lives—and these people and these institutions are terrified that such efforts could continue. Writing this paragraph, reading it over, it all feels so obvious as to be barely worth saying, and yet it takes enormous mental effort.
Whatever the causes, it is actively rude to acknowledge in most public spaces what’s happened to us, how it felt, and how it still feels now. The idea that this experience should have any lasting implications is all but forbidden. These norms can’t help but enter our homes, our celebrations, our families. Or rather, it may be more accurate to say that interaction with familiar people and places have an inevitable tendency to reinforce the emerging COVID taboos; going home reminds us of how to be home, and how to be the same people that we were before. It would be insane to deny ourselves these comforts and pleasures, but I do wish that we could equally spend time in unknown states and structures—things so unfamiliar that we would be forced to really see them, reminders that we could be different from what we’re like now.
I think that most people I know have recently made, or will soon make, long-delayed pilgrimages to visit family and old haunts. I wonder if they’re feeling this too. Doesn’t it seem as if there is something profound that we should be saying or doing? I am so dissatisfied with my post-quarantine self. There is something else that I should be writing to you. Surely we should be mourning the dead, celebrating ourselves as the living, or both. But I haven’t mourned yet, and sometimes it seems like I will never really celebrate.
In the years that I first learned to see the world, back when I lived in Timber Falls and later in my mother’s home, we knew that history had ended. I learned, without ever quite forming the thought, that nothing important would ever happen to me, good or bad, and this was deeply comforting. It meant that I would never be forced to do anything brave. There is, I suppose, no reason that COVID would have to change that. I think that I was brave, though. Maybe that’s what I should have been saying, what I should say now—that I think I was brave, and you were brave too. We are capable of things we never guessed. I want all of us to remember. I want us to form the thought.
Thank you as always for reading this. It went on longer than I planned, and I’m not quite sure I managed to communicate what I wanted to, but I’m hoping that it made some sense to you and maybe helped you name a thing that you’re feeling. Have you visited your home town or any old haunts since the end of quarantine, assuming yours has ended? Tell me what it was like.
If you enjoyed this essay, maybe share the web version with a friend or on Twitter. I’ll see you in two weeks.