Journey Home

So, I’m getting ready for a trip home to the Hoosierland, and I’m taking my beau. This is the first time I’ve invited a beau home, which didn’t stop my aunts from adding my last boyfriend, whom they’ve never met, to the Family Tree. No shit. They still have a photo of us up (we broke up in 2003) on what I call the Wedding Table. The Wedding Table is a table at my grandmother’s with photographs of all 18 million grandchildren at their weddings. Oh, and then there’s Dan and me. I haven’t laid eyes on Dan since 2004.

Anyway: There’s my family for you. Most of them live in the same area code, married before 25 and had babies. Great for them. But I didn’t do that, and while they love me and they try to get it, they just kind of don’t. (Honestly, I don’t get them either, but I try.) As a disclaimer, my immediate family—mom, dad, big sis, little sis, didn’t go down the rural-Midwestern-life-path either, and they get that there are other ways to do things.

So, S. and I are staying at the local B&B. I called the proprietor of said B&B, who is the mother of one of my old high school classmates. So I make my reservation and she says “So, have you heard? Little Eddie S. died. Surely you remember him—you did the play Grease together when you were juniors. The paper said the memorials are to go to a mental health facility. What do you think that means? Well I’ll save the obituary for you.”

And there you go: You call to make a reservation from a stranger and before you know it you have the town news and an invitation to gossip about the mental health of a kid you sat three pews behind in church for 15 years. Just in case being in Indianapolis during a huge (HUGE) NASCAR event isn’t enough to scare the pants off my tolerant and loving boyfriend on his first trip to Indiana, the obituary on the pillow of our bed and breakfast will.

Ed, the classmate who just died, suffered deeply from depression, and was the town’s only other poet. Even though we weren’t close, I’ve read his work, done theatre with him, and feel a sort of poet-kindred ship. His obituary says he’d just finished preparing his second manuscript. I’ve been saying little prayers for his family. I hope he found at least some comfort in his art.