There are parts of the chicken that don’t look like they should be eaten but dad does anyway, hunched over the table and working it with his hands and lips. Because he’s missing some teeth dad doesn’t chew as much as he gnashes, having learned to favor the biting power of the canines. Naturally I’m reminded of this whenever I eat meat on the bone and find myself doing the same, chewing parts I’m uncertain about. Was that a bone or a piece of fat? And then gnashing and quickly swallowing, like dad.

I love where I live but like Frank Sinatra sang, I love coming home. Yesterday I was coming back from Costco when I saw a black bear trying to cross the road. I honked and it doubled back into the woods. And right behind it, another bear: this one climbing a tree, looking awkward with its arms and legs stuck to it, like a clip-on bear. Here I am with jars of French mustard and sacks of Turkish apricots rolling around in the back and right there on the side of the road is a wild bear. I love where I live!, I cried.

There’s home and then there’s home-home, your roots. I go back a couple times a year now as everyone just keep getting older. I always fly through Newark, and for the past 20 years it hasn’t changed a bit. Except now they’ve ganged together all the rental car companies at P4, all of them except the one I contracted with, so Charlotte and I had to double back to Terminal B on the AirTrain and follow the complex instructions to the shuttle meeting point, then call someone for a pickup with our contract number (not the booking number), all of which made me feel old as dad.

And now any time I rent a car, when I get inside it smells like weed. So I’m reminded of my sobriety every time I open the door, which is a lot.

Charlotte and I drive the 71 miles from Newark to our exit, the Lehigh Valley, across the Pennsylvania border and off route 22. The Lehigh Valley mall is still there somehow, though its anchor department store is long abandoned, the white facade peeling and blackened by highway grime. Everywhere I look there are memories: the times my grand-dad took us to dinner at that Mexican restaurant, raising our drinks and toasting, I can still see him smile.

There’s the Italian ice stand with its green, white and red sign, same as it’s always been. And I say to Charlotte, we’ll have to go there.

There’s the old service station where we used to take our car, with the three weird-looking statues mounted to the store front: Manny, Moe, and Jack. They’re life-sized and wearing matching sweaters with eyeglasses and facial hair, peeling, same as they were in the ’70s.

The roadsides are the same and so are the traffic lights, the old bakery and strip malls, the billboards: these are my roots, all intact, tiny fibers of memory that make me who I am.

I bring Charlotte back so she can take from it too. So the rest of my family can see her but also so she can know them, as we haven’t been back since 2019.

We meet at the diner like we always do, the one by my dad’s house. His wife is using a walker now and we try not to make a big deal of that, but we need to get a table not a booth, because it’s hard getting out of booths.

And then we order and make small talk and eat and settle up, and plan for what’s next. It’s always the same, and there’s comfort in that. Though we live on the other side of the country and only see each other once or twice a year, we try to make it seem normal.

There is the neighborhood where my friend Loren grew up, I tell Charlotte. And she says “wow, cool.” Though nothing about it is, how could it be? She’s just being nice. Or making new connections herself.

There’s the old soccer field where I played in high school, and the concrete wall we stood against for our team picture. We were all trying to look grown up so none of us were smiling and with the wall behind us it looked like we were a team of prisoners from World War II, I say.

And we could go by our first house on 12th street but what’s the point of that I think, I’m dragging her through the muck of my memories. So instead I go there by myself when it’s just turning light, and stroll by the old house trying to act normal but stopping on the sidewalk with a long stare at the porch, the screen door, trying to retrieve all I can though there’s nothing left. And I do the same around the back of the house, looking over the fences and past garages, and just feel sad and alone.

We watch the eclipse and despite everything I’ve read about eye safety all of us wind up staring at the sun too long and then wondering if we’ve done permanent damage. My dad’s brother says he’s looked at the sun plenty of times behind clouds and he’s fine, no problem. And besides, primitive people didn’t know not to look at the sun: they didn’t have glasses like this, he says.

I sit with his logic wondering how it applies to us, and feel primitive myself. Like I haven’t changed one bit either. I still eat like they do, still draw pictures of myself on walls hoping someone will know I was here. Or maybe my life will make more sense to them somehow. And then I sit with the logic in that. How will I ever know?

Categories: identity, Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, pacific northwest