I am at Terry's. Terry is headed north to Humboldt State with his son Greg for Admission Day. They will be back tomorrow. You would think I might resent flying here yesterday only to be left alone in the house today, but that is not the way it works. I have two homes and two normal lives. They are just 2,000 miles apart and completely different. No matter where I land, SFO or IND, I feel like I am coming home. When I leave, I feel like I am going home. When I am here, I have a surrogate son (who will be great someday but hates me now as I am the easiest target). When I am in Bloomington, I have Ned (who is amazing and loves me more than I deserve). There is symmetry in sons, if not in the attendant emotions.
When I am in Bloomington, I cling to my women friends: Mimi of course, and two others. Rebecca lives two houses down from me, is a stay-at-home mom with a phd in theater history writing a book on Jewish theater during the Third Reich. Diane is a colleague at IU, a neuroscientist who examines the effects of endocrine disrupters (dioxin, pcbs) on birds. They both have daughters; I have decided that it is much, much easier to have teenage sons, even if they hate you. When I am in California, I know Allison is within reach, and I have some professional contacts in the city, but I haven't made new women friends.
One phenomenon is olfactory. When you live somewhere, you get used to the way it smells. You don't notice it much except when the weather or season changes. I notice it whenever I come to either home. They are entirely different. Marin smells like pine and eucalyptus. Bloomington smells like lawn. In each case, you have a strong positive association with the smell, because it means you are home.
Terry says it would make him crazy to live like this. It is true that I get confused when I go grocery shopping. Am I out of basil in Indiana or California? What is the laundry situation? There is the challenge of ensuring a balance of seasonally appropriate clothes for two different climates across the year. As I have written before, there are vast political and cultural differences. And Bloomington is a fishbowl - no matter where I go, someone will know me or there will be at best one degree of separation. Marin is anonymous; I get no sense of community, but I still have a sense of home. I know my way around and I have grocery stores, medical care, a dry cleaner, favorite bars, bookstores, coffee shops, and drug stores. I guess it is not really that much different from when Colleen and John had the apartment in NYC and the house in Pawling: two different places but both home.
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While I don't have relationships to make a long distance, I do live in two different homes (and understand the grocery confusion, although I don't leave much in New Orleans). I feel differently in each home, however, and identify myself differently.
In New Orleans, I'm not the terribly responsible lawyer, but more of a carefree literary character, and less on edge. Not sure if that is accurate but I will have to think on it some more.
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