Adventures in the Familiar Zone
How the very places you longed to escape somehow become exciting again
Photo by Michael Tuszynski on Unsplash
Once upon a time, I lost my way on a walk, and I genuinely panicked that I’d remain disorientated long enough to die of exposure. It was a summer’s evening in urban England, I was half a mile from my front door in full sight of two roads, and I was nearly 40 years old. From the safety of my East London sofa just now, I image-searched ‘adventure’ on my laptop and was greeted with dozens of photos of very fit but clearly insane people, separated from certain deaths only by the tips of their ice axes, or the thin nylon of their parachutes, or the presumed integrity of rocky outcrops over yawning canyons. As I scrolled through these images, I could taste cortisol creeping metallically into my mouth. Clearly, I am ill suited to adventure of the adrenaline-pumping variety.
Also once upon a time, I moved to Chicago and then London from my childhood home in the Midwestern suburbs, a level of adventure that I was prepared to undertake. I explored new cities, took a handful of chances with my career, and kissed men with glamorous accents. For me, this was boldness. But these leaps into the unknown happened decades ago, and what was once foreign has become familiar. Suddenly, although I don’t know exactly when it happened, it’s my home town that feels novel, that seems cloaked in a mantle of mystery and possibility. Perhaps even my parents’ anodyne subdivision holds as much potential for excitement — albeit, of a milder kind — as any unfamiliar country I’ve yet to explore.
In the tongue of the ancient Romans, adventurus meant ‘about to happen’ and advenire meant ‘arrive’. In Old French, auenture was something that occurred by luck, by chance. I frequently have no idea what’s about to happen when I arrive in Indiana, and on a recent visit, it was pure chance that I happened to be on social media when a man I knew only slightly back in high school sent me a message. Weren’t you friends with Lisa? Did you know her mother died?
If this doesn’t sound like the start of an adventure to you, let me remind you of something that you may recall from school, as I do: the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks. The take-home message here is that it all counts. It’s all relative. You choose your brand of adventure, and I’ll choose mine.
Mere hours after that message on Facebook, I find myself at a funeral home, the last place I planned to be during my Christmas holidays. Against the far wall is the dead mother of my high school friend, in a box, and all around her are older versions of people I knew long ago. They have gently expanded in various directions: softer jawlines, wider waistlines, plumper cheekbones. I surprise them, because I am not where they expect me to be. Don’t I live in England? I’m also not accompanied by the person they expect to see. Where is my husband? Am I here with a…funeral date?
I didn’t really know him back in the day, but I was aware of him. He was an interesting hybrid species roaming the halls of our high school. Because he was on the football team, you could have classified him as a jock, but he was also an honours student, a swot, a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast. Predictably, the latter things made him an occasional target for bullies when he was younger, but now he has come into himself, he has won the day. He also hasn’t expanded much, and he knows it, too.
He approaches people confidently with his warm down-home voice and an extended hand, saying his name straightaway to spare people’s blushes in case they can’t quite place him. I can see them swooning ever so slightly. He kneels on the ground to talk to our bereaved friend’s children, dressed in their best and perched awkwardly on the kind of upholstered furniture one expects in a funeral home. He gets on everyone’s level, like the best politician, but he’s not and never could be a politician because there’s too much incipient scandal in him, too much roguery. He works the room like Justin ‘Steal Your Girl’ Trudeau on the campaign trail, although I suspect he wouldn’t agree with the Canadian prime minister on much.
We navigate this space like a couple. I am revelling in the illusion, enjoying that he is tall and handsome and has brought me here, as though it were prom rather than what it actually is. He possesses a repertoire of things that let a girl know and he is rolling them out right on cue: the touches of the hand in conversation, the whispering of something just the right distance from your ear when whispering is not required, a knack for edging a bit into your personal space but not too much. He possesses the situation so skilfully that it becomes difficult to dislike him, even though you know he’s tricky.
Funerals and high school reunions are very similar. Each provokes acute awareness of the passage of time, of the frailty of the flesh, of all the paths not taken.
A much-aged former mayor enters the room and talks to us about the town sewers. ‘When you flush a toilet, you want to know that it’s going somewhere,’ he says. Whatever your politics, that’s hard to dispute.
My funeral date pulls his phone from his pocket to show people photos of his log cabin. It’s a magazine cover of a house, with a porch that runs all the way around, the kind of place you call to mind when you’re lying to yourself that life could be cozy and idyllic and safe right up until the point that you find yourself lying in a box. Folks coo over its perfection, and you can tell that they’re not just trying to be polite. He calls it his forever home and points out how deftly and smoothly he has filled in the chinks between the logs.
I know a bit about log houses. When I was a young resident of suburban Indiana I compulsively and repeatedly read Laura Ingalls’ Little House on the Prairie, with its detailed descriptions of house construction. There were many houses, for the family was always moving to ever-wilder frontiers and encountering danger and threat along the way. But Laura’s dad, Charles, kept everyone safe because he had the strength and the know-how. He filled in the cracks of their log houses to keep out wind and snow. He carried a gun. With his own hands he would hew and hang a heavy wooden front door on each new house as protection against wolves and ‘Indians’.
My funeral date isn’t offended by the word ‘Indian’ and has no truck with political correctness or cultural sensitivity. Many’s the time I’ve been tempted to yell at him on social media with all the strength of my convictions. But right now I don’t feel like my adult, feminist, liberal self. I am having odd impulses that I despise. I want his protection from the harsh world. I want to sit by the fire, on his lap.
In the driver’s seat, he pilots his car down the winding streets of our old neighbourhood. He’s imposed it, this tour down memory lane. He doesn’t suggest that we undertake it or seek my assent. We point at houses and name names: Chris, Jennifer, Chandra, Boomer, Jimmy. He draws up for a moment outside his childhood home, and the deck he built with his late father is still intact and just visible around the side of the house. A tree has been removed, he notices, precise in his horticultural reminiscence.
A little further on, he pauses again at our old school. I remark that I didn’t learn much there, but he says he wouldn’t trade those days for anything. ‘Folks from our school have done all right,’ he says, and it’s true. The building has been remodelled so extensively, though, that it is no longer ‘our’ school, and anyway we don’t know whether collective pronouns are warranted here.
He and I can each recall particular evenings. He and I can each picture the basements and breezeways and kitchens of these houses, but there is no real overlap between us, and we’re confused even about the things on which we agree. Lee killed himself, on that we concur, but we cannot be sure about the house, cannot pinpoint the garage door behind which it may or may not have actually happened. And why? I don’t know, and he isn’t sure either. (Discharged from the military — dishonourably? A bad breakup? The boredom of a suburban life not freely chosen, too far removed from the excitement and risk of battle?)
We keep going. He points out streams that were the long-ago backdrops for frog catching and crawdad capturing, the scenes of childhood summers spent unsupervised, calf-deep in creek water. We drive on and on and recall a time when everything was still possible, when it was all to play for, when it hadn’t yet been determined whose lives would run parallel and whose would intersect.
This is our first real intersection, his and mine, but my bones are saying that surely I have known him all my life. You don’t get to choose who feels like home.
We end up at a coffee house in a 1920s bungalow near the old main street, and I eat a contraband turkey sandwich from an even-more-contraband container. How is this happening? I don’t eat poultry and I abhore single-use plastic. I tell myself that I am making too many exceptions to my rules and should not make any more today.
Another friend from high school arrives and intimates that she has private matters of the heart to discuss with me. My funeral date says it’s okay, he has somewhere to be, but he asks her if he can steal me for a moment, ‘stolen’ being the appropriate concept, ‘moment’ the accurate description. I walk him to the door and venture only just beyond it, aware of a charge in the atmosphere, the drawing near of a risk too far.
We stand on the front porch and he calls me ‘gal’ in his drawling voice — it could be no more American than this, surely, and how exotic that feels, as though I truly were a stranger in a strange land. He envelops me in a lengthy embrace and then, ever so fleetingly, kisses my mouth. There is no soundtrack, though if there were, I doubt very much that he and I would agree on what it should be.
As quickly as it began, it’s finished. There is no drama, no parting shot of adrenaline. As I turn to cross the threshold again, the transition back into everyday life is imperceptible to anyone but me. All that had so unexpectedly arrived departs again, and behind me, on a quintessentially American front porch, an afternoon’s adventure dissolves into the air, like a mist.
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Wow. Love it. I like how you write. “They have gently expanded in various directions.” :) and I’m so drawn to your friend. Thank you.
This was lovely, thank you for sharing xx