Of Bears and Penguins

Tomorrow I'm going back to Missouri. Leaving this place so familiar to me, so comfortable to me. And there's always a bit of melancholy in that.

You've been to those houses where every color is coordinated to match, right down to the color of the dog and cat? A house perhaps where there was a theme in the decoration?

Yeah, my family's home is not like that. Never has been.

We have a kerosene lamp sitting next to a painted coconut on our mantle. Mardi Gras beads hanging off the edge of a quilt rack that my Great-Grandmother’s quilt hangs on. The figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza hanging on our kitchen wall. A cigar store Indian in one of the corners.

I like to think that it’s a special place. And I love every crazy thing in this house, and I love that there is no uniting theme, and that nothing matches, and that when a person comes to the house for the first time there is a usually something that makes them say, “Oh, how interesting.”

But what I really love is what makes all of those things so special. The fact that some bit of my family is wrapped up in the painted coconut, and the cigar store Indian, and all the other quirky things in our house.

My folks are pretty good people when you come right down to it.

When I leave I take these things with me…

Waking up and hearing my parents reading the news-paper over coffee. Being under the covers and hearing them laugh in the kitchen.

Reading aloud. There was the year we read Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” – “By the shores of Gitchee-Goomi, by the big sea shining waters…” And then the year when Dad went on a “Henry V” kick – “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today who fights with me shall be my brother…”
And the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Stuart Little, and Edgar Allan Poe. My passion for literature begins with sitting in my parent’s lap and hearing them read all these things, and so many more. Milne, and Beatrix Potter, and Silverstein.

Beating the pots and pans. Walk this way. Woof-woof. Cold biscuits. Argentine art museums.

All these things mean something very dear to me.

And I think of them when I am far away from home.