Home Sweet Home

The last few weeks have had me feeling like I’m in high school again – and not in a good way.

First, I let Charlie hold the car keys while I was opening the garage door and he pushed the “trunk open” button which resulted in the trunk getting caught on the garage door, sparks flying and our car needing $1500 worth of repairs. The next day, while driving a car with bungee cords holding the trunk closed, my crappy depth perception resulted in me hitting one of those white support poles in the mall parking garage. Suddenly, I was sixteen again, having to tell my parents that I’d rear ended someone on West Street or hit the tree on the way out of our driveway. Bobby was a lot more understanding that my parents ever were but I still got the sinking feeling in my stomach that reminded me of everything I hated about growing up.

Then I went to a friend’s bridal shower in the neighborhood where I used to live. Driving there was like watching an old movie again for the first time in years. Everything is familiar and sort of sentimental but it’s not yours. It was like driving into someone else’s life. That is until the bride’s mom got mad at her and yelled at me in front of a room full of people and all of a sudden I was seventeen years old again trapped in my mother’s kitchen with nowhere to hide from the insanity. Being yelled at by someone you consider an adult when you’re actually an adult yourself is not fun because even though I’m forty years old, I still wouldn’t dare talk back to one of my mom’s friends so I just stood there and took it just like I did when I was a kid. Which reminded me about how home was never a place I wanted to be for long.

Last week I went to the beach with my family for our end of the summer getaway, and as luck would have it our beach trip coincided with my best friend from high school’s beach trip with her mother. Rachael lives in Seattle now and we only see each other once a year when she comes home for a few days to visit her family. Before our visit last summer, it had been nineteen years since we’d seen each other in person but the minute she walked into my house it was like 1986 again. So when she called me from a bar to come meet her, I dropped everything. And it was so worth it because what she gave me back was the thing all my memories of late had been missing – the laughter.

See sometimes I’m so consumed with the bad stuff that I forget about the good stuff. I forget about how it felt to drive around in my smooth wood paneled station wagon blaring “Blister in the Sun”. I forget the freedom I felt on a car ride, especially a car ride that involved some version of a faked asthma attack, a Chinese food buffet and a skipped afternoon of school. I forget the easy, giddy laughter that existed between teenaged friends and the strength and hopefulness that those moments gave me.

Seeing Rachael brought it all back with one very important difference. In the old days, at the end of the fun that sinking feeling always snuck back into my stomach because I wanted to go anywhere but home. But on Friday despite how much fun I was having; and how much I loved being reunited with my pal, I wasn’t sad to go home at the end of the night. Bobby, Mac and Charlie gave me the home I always wanted. Or I gave it to them. It doesn’t matter. All that does is that I am finally happy to go home. And that’s pretty cool.