When I woke I really didn’t know where I was. Still divided between two places, two time zones, two bedrooms. But there was the clock on the side of my bed anchoring me to this place: home-home. And after being away for two weeks there was nowhere better.

On my last day in Germany mom and I took a walk down to the Aldi so I could buy a souvenir for Charlotte. But it was more a way of killing time, which was an odd thing to do considering how rare it was we saw each other.

As we’ve gotten older the gaps between our visits have grown, the largest being that stretch during Covid. That was the last time we drank together, on that visit she made to the States in the early fall when we went to the McMenamins near Portland, my favorite place on earth to drink. Deep Oregon hippy, Ken Kesey land.

That McMenamins is a massive expanse of restaurants and pubs with a former poorhouse in the center converted to a hotel, rumored haunted, adorned with surreal artwork, antique lights, blood red shades, warm colored rugs. Mom was delighted to be taken there and kept saying that on the ride down from Seattle. We had perfect, Indian-summer weather and nothing but time on our hands. I did have a business call in the morning but it would serve as a forcing function to limit our drinking and cut it off at 8, we agreed.

There is little I can remember from that night but in the morning we pocketed some beer coaster souvenirs which mom took back to Germany and now has in her kitchen beside the coffee maker. On the drive back to Seattle we would have stopped midway at another McMenamins where we’d have a beer with lunch and I’d struggle to keep awake for the remainder of the journey home, past the traffic backups near Olympia then Tacoma, and the calendar would change over to October and mom would soon be headed home. Then with the pandemic that following spring literally years would pass before I’d see her again—not until August of ‘22—and I’d be nearly two years sober, relearning how to relate to people with whom I’d spent so much of my life drinking.

Sitting in the dark of my den back home I had to pause on that, imagining myself mirrored in mom’s house, writing in the early morning dark on the other side of the globe, my other home. All the memoirists warned you had to go deep and dredge up some old shit if you wanted to get to what mattered. And you had to enter that space alone. I’d tried before with therapists but they were more like guides trying to help you find the way. Mine looked like a fuzzy little doorway with a candle lit on the other side, like that first morning in Besigheim I was groping around in the dark.

On the plane home it was just me and the video screen for ten hours retracing the route back over the IDL, reduced to an icon of a little white jet. My heart was heavy with all I remembered, tickling me with touches of what we’d done and might do again. But when anyone asked when I was coming back to Germany I said I didn’t know, next time. And we’d laugh. The flights were so expensive and it was hard to know when I’d get time off from work. Our time would get reduced down like that too, a little white jet.

Mom and I went for our final ice cream but a handwritten sign on the door said they were closed, reopening the day I left. That’s life, mom said.

It was the Bavarian named Frank who said don’t worry, we take care of your mom here. But did they, really? Was anyone taking care of mom (most importantly, mom herself)?

I lay in bed in the dark blinking at the clock. I rewound the ones downstairs and counted back the chimes as they tolled. There is no time like the present, but much to reconcile with the past.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, identity, journal writing, travel