28 Jan 25

In the dream I was a kid again with my schoolmates going somewhere far away on a school trip. We were filing into a large crowded seating area and everyone was quickly deciding who they wanted to sit by and somehow I got cut off from my friends, or they’d decided there was no room for me, and I was alone. I hadn’t packed anything and we’d be away for a long time somewhere cold.

I woke with that feeling and wondered what it meant. Then I remembered the Janis Ian song mom played for us before bed (“At Seventeen”), a song about feeling alienated and rejected, that really cuts to the bone. Though it was somber the melody stuck with me on my morning walk trying to recall the dream, like the song was its soundtrack (or the dream, a video). Maybe I felt removed from my past or my family. The song opened some door in me.

My friend Don took a songwriting class with the singer Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief and she said one of the most important things about songwriting is to learn how to be vulnerable. That’s probably what I most liked in the stories I’ve read by Anne Lamott as I work through her memoir each night before bed, the times she shares something really personal.

It’s now two weeks since I’ve been in Europe and my internal clock feels confused because normally I’d be heading home by now. Most trips we do are 10-12 days which wind up being more just like one long week. I’ve started to crave my morning walks back home though, in that funny way I always struggle to be present. Here I replicate that same daily routine by taking long walks around the vineyards and farms. And I flicker between memories of past times or forward-looking plans. I try to imagine what it would be like to come back and live here and would that make sense. Whether our being here is tethered to my mom or if we could have a life here ourselves, it’s unclear.

Mom was the mom I always knew just older. And I internalized that sense and sometimes felt older too. It was hard to tell what life we were living, the party days of yore or a life more deeply rooted. Seemed like one life was reaching for its old self while another was reaching for something new.

Here were a couple photos I’d set aside to take home: one of an apartment in Philadelphia that had an old girlfriend’s handwriting on the back and made me feel sad each time I saw it. Another, my mom and John right after they’d moved in to this house in Germany. Mom was about my age then. What happened to us? You could see what happened, right there.

Sometimes being here felt like being in a dream. And the funny thing about dreams seeming so real. As real as the cold felt on my mom’s toilet seats, as real as the dark.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Anne Lamott, Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, travel