Leaving Returns

 

[An old post, maybe ten years ago.]

Somewhere in central New Mexico last Sunday, somewhere around the pueblo named Laguna, I felt an echo of de je' vu and remembered the time, more than thirty years ago, when me and the cat were packed into a sky-blue VW hatchback, rumbling along the very same corridor on I-40, leaving Arizona and the Southwest and returning to the green cusp of the Great Plains, where I've lived ever since. The cat died years ago. That's another story.

On that trip, it was just she and I, a gorgeous calico. My wife and brand new baby girl had flown from Phoenix to Sioux City that very day, as I remember. A litter box was on the floor in the back; and by the time I got to Winslow or so, she'd stopped howling. Poor thing had never been in a car. The howling had been awful. She'd almost died in the desert. I almost killed her.

It wasn't the cat I remembered last Sunday, it was the memory of a strange feeling that something was over. Our four-years in Phoenix, our first four years. I'd really loved teaching in the kind of city high school I'd wanted to be part of since Welcome Back, Kotter or Room 222.

Me and the calico--our leaving meant the end of all of that, but I didn't regret putting Arizona in the rearview. I remember thinking good things about returning to small-town Iowa, to the college where I'd been taught Calvinism--among a load of other things, some good, some not so.

The Arizona administrator who'd hired me just two years before really disliked my returning to Iowa. "There, everyone's like you," he told me. "Here, you're really special." But it was a college job. I knew if I were ever going to write anything I had to get out of the high school classroom--no matter how much I liked it--and get to a place where day-in, day-out classroom prep didn't entirely exhaust whatever creativity I had. I wanted to teach in college. I remember having the feeling that I'd not travel this way again--from Phoenix to Siouxland. That a four-year chapter, an important one, was done, finished, over.

Last Sunday morning--sun so bright I couldn't see half the time--there I was again, same road, Laguna pueblo--I've got pictures--looked a whole lot different thirty-plus years before. The landscape is the same, of course, just more people. Even pueblos spread.

One never really closes up shop, I suppose. Once, years ago, I thought I was on that section of freeway for the last time. Several times I've been there since, twice in the last six months; and, I'm betting, I'll be there again--soon, in fact.

Doors don't always close the way we expect, I suppose, don't lock but once maybe.

It was a gorgeous Sunday morning in the New Mexico highlands. Odd, isn't it? All that determined leaving just then returned.