Going Home

It was as soon as I left Redwood City on my drive home from work today that I found the fog. It was lying there, just where I had left it, on the 280 hugging San Francisco. Those two... can't seem to pull them apart some days. Ain't it cute? I was happy today as I crept through the gray bubbly mist, for reasons beyond the weather which will have to be detailed in the paragraphs that follow, but not now. And perhaps it's best not to reason one's way out of contentment. I was smiling and that is nearly the end of the story.

I cracked my windows open to the dropping Fahrenheits as I climbed north - how dare I open my transporter, my vessel, myself to such penetration?! No comment. But it felt so good. It was like I was breathing with my full lungs for the first time. The oxygen was rushing through my veins and limbs with gusto and adolescent exaggeration. My body was living. And in my deep inhales I could taste the scents swirling around my car from all abouts the wide highway. The Eucalyptus Trees rimming the road were being milked by the fog as the traffic eased to and fro, letting the green, sugary smell pour out from the roots and become absorbed in my nostrils. It tasted warm and sweet; like hot chocolate on a summer day, it wasn't needed but it made home feel a lot safer with its presence. And even when the fog let out its droplets of moisture, I left my windows down so I would not forget where I was.

Home. It's the ultimate place, concept, and feeling. It's a buzz kill for some, the some who overlook the specific capitalization and melodic hum it brings when it's said with intention. To many, home is where your parents live, and where you still have a bedroom closet crammed with worn out jeans, shoe boxes brimming with high school pictures, and boxcar derby trophies. Home is where people beg you to come back to as often as possible - at least once a year. Home is where there's one bar (Dan's Tavern) where you know every karaoke song as a number and the owner will jerry-rig the pinball machine so you don't have to pay. And when you bring all of this up in conversation, it's pretty natural to feel the pat of nostalgia on your back before shrugging and moving onto more valuable topics. "Did the Tigers beat the A's? Damn I hope so."

If or when you're lucky, home can be a much larger discussion... if it can be captured with words at all. When it hums like the mantra "om" so soft in your inner ear and you can start to hear your self - your body and the life around you - without your conscience, that is when you can put on a big H. That's when you can smile throughout your entire body, and when keeping the windows down in the fog-rain is the right thing to do. Home is being exactly where you are, unabashedly, with the certainty that it will travel lightly where ever you go.

I was Home for a moment today somewhere between Millbrae and San Bruno as that Eucalyptus streamed into me. It escaped when my mind came back into the game, but for a moment I was truly there and living more than I have ever lived before. And the justification?

Credit should go to the details of the day; let us never forget the piddly shit we murk through morning to night:
*Yoga at 6:30 am. Instructor was a penguins fan. When she said how pleased she was that they beat the Red Wings, I'm not kidding, I lost my balance.
*Breakfast donut. $1.50
*Data entry for 3 hours. Tears of blood.
*Supervisor told everyone she was leaving the organization. The directors teared the real ones while I, corralling my hopeful anxiety, envisioned my strategic plans to take over the world.
*Department director called me and asked if he could take me out to lunch on Friday to discuss my assets and my future in the agency.
*Social arrangements were put into place for the rest of the week.
*Taco Tuesdays; 2x $1 tacos + 2x $2 coronas + Marina district company = $5.98
*Muni; 28, 22, N. cold waits and a sunset by the Golden Gate Bridge.

In sum, it brought me to and through a state of Home that cannot be forgotten or replaced. Sometimes my independence is staggering. Sometimes a lukewarm hot chocolate from the Safeway brand is the best I can do for myself. Today, I guess with all that has happened, I am cozy inside myself knowing, knowing, knowing...