Sitting in the Ozark airlines waiting area of the St. Louis airport. Another half hour before my flight to Washington. My anxieties about returning to Missouri have been transformed into a deep sense of nostalgia for these people, their lives, and the world that formed me.
Throughout the weekend members of my family came by Grandma’s to visit. I am moved by the enormous sense of love I feel for them. Plain, honest people with no pretensions or imagination. Possessed by an unfailing sense of devotions and support for one another. They are a strong family and I am touched by their unspoken gestures of love for me– Lawrence’s orphan, the renegade, the one who moved away. Grandma’s utter adoration for me is astounding. There is a frailty, a tiredness about her that I have not seen before. Her eyes seem never far from tears. She seems always to be pondering some mortal sadness– some huge sorrow. She is, I think, saying goodbye daily to her life. I left her standing in the door, her body heaving in tears, weeping and waving her hand pitifully is gestures of a little child– her thick veined hand flapping like a wounded bird.
The demons I had feared this weekend did not exist. I looked for them, I waited for them. They have ceased to exist. In their absence I found skinny, lost little boys.
It seems like such an obvious thought, and yet it has carried the weight of a revelation for me this weekend. This is where I came from, this is the material from which I am made. And yet my flight from Missouri when I was 19 was wrought in such trauma and terror of my father that I shed all sense of identity with THEM– I have spent my life trying to define myself in opposite terms to THEM. THEY, and Springfield, MO., represented all that threatened my life– my existence. This weekend I have realized that I can never alter the fact that this what I am made of. This genetic and cultural fabric is inexorably me. This is my flesh and blood. Regardless of where I transplant myself, I will be a Missourian until the day I die. Any understanding or self analysis is incomplete that does not include this background.