There's No Place Like It... part 1

I landed in Los Angeles with no fanfare and very little awareness about the reality of where I was.  After sweating out the walk through the grainy air of the west coast metropolis, I gathered my bags from the conveyor belt and made my way through U. S. customs.  I only had ninety minutes to catch my connecting flight to Chicago then to Minneapolis, so I was impatient to get moving.  After gathering my bags, putting them on the conveyor belt to (hopefully) await me in Minneapolis, I realized I was hungry.  This was not a regular kind of hungry...

This was a Cheetos kind of hungry.

It's not that I am particularly attached to Cheetos as they seem as if the manufacturers gathered twigs from the factory grounds, dipped them in extraordinarily salty cheese and packaged them with the grinning face of Chester the Cheetah.

I paid an exorbitant amount for an extremely small bag.  I consumed the thirty seven orange twigs in seventeen seconds and then licked the coagulated cheese from my fingers relishing every little grain.  Perfect.  When you find the thing you've been missing, you relish it even more.  Sometimes you don't even remember what it is that you miss only that there is a small, empty space inside you that used to be full and now it is a vacuum.

It would be somewhat superficial of me to write that I have a Cheetos size hole in my heart, but Cheetos were representative of all the things that I had missed and wasn't even really aware of it.  Whether Cheetos, Mr. Pibb, Dairy Queen Blizzards, freshwater lakes, squirrels or chipmunks, I never noticed how the little things are the things that make home, well, home.  Not just physical minutiae of the past, but sounds and smells too that bring memories to the forefront of my mind.  Those sights and sounds that seem to play on a projector screen just behind my conscious vision. 

Like the timbre of my mother's voice or the wrinkles in my uncle's face that used to be backroads and are now threatening to become superhighways.  Perhaps it's the smell of the black earth baking in the steaming hot summer sun or the aromas clinging to the grandparents' houses.  Each sense is loaded with a backpack of memories and for much of my three week vacation back to the United States, I found myself staring whimsically into a sunset or breathing deeply of pine forests and pungent fish houses. 

I guess I went home.  And if I really think about it, home is the place that never feels like you really left. 

I visited almost every place that I had lived.  Sometimes on my travels I was drawn to the obscure; I took a path that I hadn't even intended just to see what memory would surface.  Other times, the thread which I followed was like that which Ariadne provided Theseus for his travel into the labyrinth. 

The thread began in Los Angeles.  I heard later from Christine that when I had landed, a group of youth from my old church, Our Savior's Lutheran in Rockford, let out a cheer.  It's nice to feel wanted and missed.  It's nice to know that there are people in this world who enjoy the homecoming as much as you enjoy going home.  To be missed, that's a real blessing.

I flew from Los Angeles to Chicago beginning in the late morning.  Traveling above the clouds, looking across  the curvature of planet earth, I looked at the far distant contrails of other planes carrying their own mythical warriors to far off places.  As I flew thousands of feet above the earth, I knew the places where I would go, but I had questions to how I would react.  Would home feel the same?  Would it be like Dorothy's return trip to Kansas, black and white, same faces?  Because I am changed by the place I now call home, would my past home still remember me?  With great excitement buoyed by small polka dots of anxiety, I landed in Chicago. 

There I sat for over an hour waiting for the next plane to take off.  Supposedly the pilots, who had just flown in from New York, didn't get the memo that my brother was circling the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport in his white car towing a bass boat waiting to pick me up.  As I had already been in transit over 24 hours, I was not in the mood to be waiting.  Waiting. Waiting.