The War at Home

       I don't sit around and think about dying. I don't ponder my mortality. 

       I think I've always known we don't get too much time. We have only so many hours. I fought sleep as a kid. I still do. Not as well as when I was 16 and tried to cram as much living, writing, raging and running into any given day as I could, but generally I still like to be the last guy up, the last man in the museum, the one the guards have to shepherd toward the door. 

     Because of this I travel well. I don't mind jet lag. I don't mind not knowing what time it is, not feeling the tick of my internal clock. Beyond physical freedom travel also brings you that psychic shake up - the chronological vertigo of moving from one place to another faster than we should ever  be able. The head rush at 30,000 feet.

   I got back from Turkey four days ago and I'm still waking up at odd hours. Sleep won't come. I wish I could embrace this like my 16 year old self - he'd have written a book by now- but mostly I walk the streets at noon feeling like it's dawn or watch tv in the middle of the night. 

   I flicked on the set in my buddy's house- it's always curious to navigate someone else's cable system, you feel a kinship if you guess well, old bonds affirmed - I got the damn thing on and the menu scrolling in under a minute and there, was The Civil War. 

   That 90's blockbuster that launched a thousand documentary channels and 1000 more Civil War neo-cons. "Lincoln said it himself 'If I can save the Union without slavery I'll do it. If I can save the Union with slavery I'll do it.' It wasn't about slavery!"  Shoot me. Or better yet, shoot them. (Wait, didn't we already do that?) 

   The Cannon in Silhouette at Sunset. The Fiddle Theme. David McCullough's Old Testament voice. The Red Line beneath the chapter titles. 

   Enough to make me groan. 

   25 years. 

   Think of Redford's film "The Candidate". He makes one impassioned, impromptu speech and becomes a challenger. His managers insist he repeat that impassioned impromptu speech verbatim 500 times and he becomes a joke. Ergo The Civil War. First time it ran I swooned, 15 years and 1500 reboots later, I wanted to hurl. And now add 10 more years. It's a classic car exempt from sentimental emission controls. It's classic doc rock.

   Regardless, I pressed "select". 

   And what came back to me as I watched was not the tale of the final episode, the sad battles after Appomatox or bourbon voiced Shelby Foote choking up "Was it not so real?" or how clearly the language of these long dead men still rings to me -how well they wrote- but that 25 years ago it was 1990 and I was a just out of college not yet to drama school, my dad and my brother were still alive, my mom still worked at CMU and what the Hell was a cell phone, who'd heard of an internet? Or blogging.
  I was back in Pittsburgh, living in a house owned by the friend of a friend who was yet to marry and wanted to be surrounded by his younger pals before the final plunge, so he charged us next to no rent and didn't care whether we slept till 2 or played U2 too loud or ate most of his food.

   I was an almost Ivy League graduate making 5.60 an hour plus tips, making lattes at a "coffee shop",  and commuting to work on a borrowed BMX. I was happy. 

   Once in awhile, I'd head home and visit mom and dad, eat out of the fridge, sleep in my old room up in the attic, if they went away for a couple days I'd colonize the house and turn it into my seraglio studio - the last designs of my sublimating High School self strewn around the little Dutch colonial. 

   But for a straight week sometime that year, was it Fall? it had to be- I came home and watched The Civil War with my parents. My father in his tan leather chair up against the fireplace. Mom in her comfier spot by the stairs. The cat dug in and drooling on one of them. I stood behind them, waiting, for awhile acting like I might leave, as if I was deciding whether or not the episode was good enough, whether I didn't have something better to do, when in reality I just didn't want to show them I wanted to be home, to be curled up by the fire, to share for an evening, oddly enough, in their silence. 

  When either of my parents was moved to tears, moved by something they'd seen or read or heard they most often said nothing. As we would in church, we gathered in a kind of piety. A shared hush. Some would call this WASPY rectitude or simple embarrassment but I've always been suspicious of people who want to show and tell me how important their feelings are- my sense is feelings come when they come and we should be grateful for them, wonder at them, thank God, rather than hold them up for all to see. "Unpack my heart with words and fall a cursing like a very drab."
   I think of the long black pews in my old church. Rows and rows of them as you walk past for communion, the slumped shoulders, the stillness, heads so obviously related not turning toward each other. It can be unbearable, yankee solemnity, but I'm comfortable being quiet before God, I've always felt my default response to the "Lord"- however you want to manifest him or her- when it wasn't singing was humility, silence. 

  And so 25 years ago when I was 23 and broke, my father and I would refrain from sniping at each other and my mom and he would call an evening's truce, and the cat would curl up around our feet and we would listen together to a fellow Pittsburgher read us a story from our country's most incredible, and maybe its saddest, chapter. 

  And since we knew him by degree, the McCullough's and the McCrady's on my dad's side grew up across the street from each other, we could tell when he read that he wasn't intoning like a distant God, or a tidy Western PA Presbyterian ticking down a list of the dead, but that he was throughout on the edge of tears. Like my dad listening as brothers, who'd fought on opposite sides, died in the same hospital with Walt Whitman the nurse to each, like my mother, an ancestral Virginian, hearing a Richmond girl bemoan the wreck of her family while the "chimneys of our leveled homes stood like telegraph poles relaying the destruction", like me listening to them both and not speaking, listening to the changes in their breathing saying they were sad and wouldn't share it. 

  And then the episode ended and it was 4:41 in the morning, tuesday the 15th of September 2015. Like any other day, but now. A side room in LA in the house of a friend from college who after he graduated was playing in Punk bands in DC while I was pouring coffee in Pittsburgh. Now a teacher, married 14 years, divorced 4. Still playing the bass. 

   The 24 hour media cycle stared me down. What next? Press select. Scroll.

   I walked out on to the porch. No light yet in the East. Dad gone, brother gone, cat long gone. - that's the thing about LA, you get a dark night but no stars and there are so few tall buildings that the land rolls out in front of you for miles. The sky's huge, you see the undulations that the desert here once had, but somehow unlike a Great Plains landscape, it's disheartening. Like the cable menu, it's endless but without comfort. Far from enobling, the eternity involved diminishes you.
   Sometimes I wish I smoked. I don't. I hummed the fiddle theme. I tried to imitate McCullough's voice, but it wouldn't come. The day I left Turkey, that morning one of the guys who ran the hotel, "Okay" was his name, asked me where I was from. Pittsburgh I told him. And you miss it yes? Yes I do, I told him.  I do. We have a word for that you know - memleket. It just means 'home', the ground there, but ....more than that. Like your word nostalgia, his eyes smiled, but ...harder.