The Leans

"I am happy to report that we are mistaken for Europeans."

This is my favorite line from my mom's recent email, written in an internet cafe in Italy.  She's there on an adventure with her older sister, my aunt, who is cool enough to have once named a cat Intrepid, and to plan trips like this, and to kidnap my mother occasionally as a travel companion on them.  I called them in the Houston airport while they waited to board their flight to Amsterdam, and had nothing but spotty memories and mixed emotions to share about trans-atlantic travel.

On the one hand, I feverishly want to do it again, and soon.  On the other hand, I remember very well the cocktail of rootlessness and unnamed grief that followed me through that airport, even while I was taking note of how cool it was that there were live birds flying around loose inside and all-white mannequins eating fake food at one of the cafe tables.  I remember very clearly being fifteen years old and buying a duty-free Heineken and a lukewarm hot dog and sitting down to a lonely, time-zone-confused lunch in a wicker chair built like an enclosed bird's nest.  I couldn't finish the beer.  My stomach hurt too bad.  I tossed out the mostly full can with a piercing sense of wishing I was older, less afraid, and knew more about what I was supposed to be doing.  Then I sat around for four hours waiting for a flight back to the U.S.

What I love about my mom's email is how wonderfully that statement encapsulates her world view and wicked sense of humor.  I also love that she's there right now, she's actually in Italy, wandering around and trying out a new language (probably mangling it, but in that endearing West Texas way), and-- I hope-- eating lots of gelato.  When someone I love very much is off doing something exciting, it almost feels like I've got my toe in the waters too.  I certainly felt like that when my little brother was learning to drive backwards through obstacle courses at stupid speeds, and when my dad was getting to see parts of Alaska I've always wanted to see.  A few times I've felt like that when Pants is off training somewhere, but mostly I'm too focused on beaming him the thought calm down, breathe, calm down.  

He's about to leave again, for a month.  This time they practice living on the boat.  It's like a dress rehearsal for everybody, even the guys that do the laundry and empty the trash and cook huge vats of corn and grease the arresting wires.  We've been watching Carrier on DVD, and I'm fascinated to no end by the city-hood of aircraft carriers.  It reminds me of those children's books where it's just huge illustrations of things, like ancient pyramids and submarines, with the sides cut away to reveal the ant farm interior.  I stare and stare, and imagine myself wandering through white metal hallways, stepping up and cocking my head to the side every time I enter a room to pass through the hatch.  I imagine myself in a stateroom, much like a big metal dorm room, where all my pictures of home are held up by magnets and my bed is a cubbyhole.  I imagine looking at the flatness of an ocean horizon and feeling weird about how much my personal space has contracted while the sky and the water got so much bigger.

Sometimes when Pants is fresh off the boat (he's only been out a couple of times), or just back from flying, he says he has "the leans."  It's something to do with his inner ear, like a mild vertigo you get sometimes.  I don't know that I've ever had this for real, but I think I can relate to the feeling.  An off-balance sense memory, mostly emotionally triggered, is what I get.  Sometimes I'll hear something that sounds like a Muslim prayer call, or smell that scent that's half smell, half temperature, when the asphalt gets so hot it becomes slightly soft, or like earlier this week I'll start thinking about Amsterdam's fucked up airport, and it's like I'm fifteen again.  Or music.  Over the weekend, Pants pirated a ton of music for his Bottomless iPod as part of his grand deployment preparations, and he asked me to start naming bands I used to listen to in high school.  He played me PJ Harvey's "Down by the Water" and Sonic Youth's "Theresa's Sound-World" and I definitely got the leans.

The heat these days is oppressive.  Yesterday topped out at 106 on the base, but out in town we only got to complain about 103.  It must be the runways.  I've worked very hard to cultivate an appreciation for edge of nowhere military towns because it's important for my survival-- I imagine it's much the same with corporate CEOs and scotch.  But the heat is proving to be a challenge this summer.  There are things that I notice that take on a sinister significance in crushing, brown-gold heat like this.  For instance:

1) Large patches of bleach-yellow weeds, morbid and crispy in death, spontaneously catch fire every day when I drive home.  I can see the smoke from far away-- a grayish smudge leaning out and up and gradually coalescing into shimmery gray over a whipping red flame.  It looks like the only thing alive for miles.  We all drive past like it's not there and I feel a hot wind push a little on my car.

2) Gas is $4.01 a gallon.  I know that this is pitifully low as a representation of its true cost, both politically and environmentally, but it still feels gross to stand there in the wilting heat, breathing fumes and getting broker by the second, only to see more stretches of burning yellow and brown.  There is a creepy symmetry in this.

3) There is a part of the highway I drive home on that passes through a low, man-made valley.  Fallow farm land dotted with falling apart shacks lies to either side, and a concrete walkway arches over the road to connect them.  The walkway has tall chain-link fence walls, and I always watch the way the wire diamond pattern from both sides of the fence shivers and warps as I speed underneath.  Last Thursday there was a kid standing directly over my lane, a boy.  The sky was brown, and the pavement was baking hot, and as I raced to the space beneath him he just stood there.  It made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

4) There are dust devils in the fields.  This is what my dad calls them-- random twists of wind and dirt that remind you how hot it is outside, and how far you are from anywhere.  They say, this is no place to stop.

I am happy my mother's in Italy, my Dad's in Wyoming, my brother's in Indiana, and Pants is headed out to the Pacific for a while.  It feels like little parts of me are spread out too.