I arrived in Birmingham around 3:30 yesterday afternoon. Dad picked me up at the airport and drove me home. I’ve lived in San Francisco for 21 years and I still call this place home. I’ve always envied people who are really of a particular city, who can say, “I’m from Rome,” or “I’m a New Yorker,” because they were born there and inherited an identity specific to place. I was born in South Bend, Indiana, but moved to Alabama when I was 2, and to Birmingham when I was 14, then to San Francisco at 18. So really, I lived here for only 6 years, but the years from 13-18, pretty big ones. While I lived here, I could only think of finding a community that had never voted for George Wallace and recycled. It’s only been in coming back every few years that I’ve come to filter an appreciation of the culture and environment through my relation to it as someone neither fully inside nor outside of it.
Over the next few days, in addition to my parents, I’ll be spending time with three very dear old friends–Susan, James, and April–each with deep roots in southern soil. I had wanted to visit Lisa, the vivacious owner of the “Cuttin’ Up!” hair salon, but she just burned herself a few days ago after heatin’ up some hair-removal wax in the microwave, spilling the concoction all over her hand and arm, the main tools of her trade. Actually the main tools of her success have been her flirtatious wit and stunning looks, so I don’t think her business is going to suffer.
Mom and Dad are like the Loud Family, not of Lance fame, just in terms of volume. My mom told my dad last night not to wake me up in the morning and let me sleep in, as we did a lot of yard work, and then stayed up late watching Giant, but at 7 they were yelling affectionately at each other and their dog, Bootsie, the morlock, rattling windows, slamming doors. It’s relatively quiet now, and I’m looking out their front window at the lovely hickory, redbud, pine, and oak trees, and the thriving dogwood which sprouted out of the crotch of a particular oak shortly after we moved in. There’s also a big hickory that was struck by lightning the weekend that we moved in, shearing off half of the tree and leaving a semicircular shell of a lower trunk supporting the great mass of the remaining crown. I keep telling my dad to take the tree down, that it’s going to fall onto their bedroom in the next storm, but I think he sees it as mirroring their own struggle in this environment, and thus it stands as an ever-leaning monument to their fragile triumph.
