Me and Jeff Bezos
The following essay is a draft of an excerpt from my working manuscript.
The guttural cries shot into my heart via my clenched intestines like a squishy and hard-won fist.
A side view of the “5,000-square-foot slice of Bellevue box-like stucco modernity” that I left behind in 1995.
All I can think of is my mom taking a can of Whole Peeled Tomatoes (while thinking how weird it is that this is the official name of this product) and squeezing them into the sauce, like a water balloon that bursts stains instead of refreshing water. Convulse, cry. Convulse, cry. I don’t mean to be dramatic — but it felt dramatic. I was 19, had just finished my first year of college 3,000 miles away, and my parents had left me to lock up and then leave the empty house of my childhood. Metaphorically, I was locking the door and throwing away the key — except for not quite, because I probably had to deliver the key to someone. Maybe a real estate agent? It’s hard for me to remember because all I recall is heaving and hearing my cries echo throughout the cavernous house. My parents were already en route to their new home in Washington, DC, where they would meet the moving van with all of the material things that I thought made a house a home, so it was up to me to be a bridge for the mysterious people who would soon replace my gauzy memories with their own couches, tables, and paintings.
It gutted me, but I’m not sure it was because of the house itself or even the fact that my parents were moving and abandoning the setting of my entire childhood in their wake. I was ok with all of that. Once I had boarded a plane for a redeye flight to my new home at college 10 months prior, I had shaken myself free of the notion that being rooted was somehow more virtuous — or even more “stable” — than being open to a more nomadic life. After all, my parents — who themselves had grown up in the Pacific Northwest — were the ones to set that tone with this out-of-left-field cross-country move. Reverse pioneering. My family, which included a younger brother who would finish out high school in DC, embodied the ethos of Seattle-based REI. Adventure awaits! (But fleece probably wouldn’t be considered “smart casual” heretofore.)
So perhaps more so, it was that I was staying behind in Bellevue, this suburb of Seattle where unbeknownst to me, Jeff Bezos was kicking off his plans for world domination at the same time. Jeff was formulating plans for Amazon in his Bellevue garage, and I was fumbling with keys to a 5,000-square-foot slice of Bellevue box-like stucco modernity. (Do I set the alarm? There’s nothing inside to steal…) Jeff was apparently harboring crazy, futuristic ideas, but what was taking up my own head space was scheduling my evenings so I had time to make sure my Bernie’s Bagels t-shirt was washed and ironed every morning before heading to my summer job at 5:30. Having to leave my home was sad mostly because I didn’t have a context in this place any longer; I could throw this whole place in the hamper with that gross t-shirt as soon as I left to go back to college.
Cue the grieving cries. To the fictitious people that I worried could hear me through the stucco: No, no one has died. No, I am not hurt. Yes, my response is slightly unreasonable. But I’m just 19, and now I need to hop in this ancient white Volvo that belonged to the deceased mother of a family friend (even my transportation was convoluted) so I can travel with a trunk full of clothes and a book or two to the first of many house-sitting jobs that will provide me with shelter until I reunite with the rest of my family at the end of the summer.
I’m untethered, I’m lonely, and I’m homesick.
***
Homesickness can be a pernicious thing. I mean, no one wants to be homesick, right?
The word — often used to describe regretful children during sleepovers or hesitant not-quite-adults dropped off at university — sounds negative. Something knotty, something unpleasant to avoid…something in our gut. It’s like an anxiety-prone law student thinking about having to present oral arguments for the first time. Is that law student in the wrong line of work? In other words, is she to somehow follow the siren song of that clench in her stomach, her desire to scrap it all and find employment elsewhere? Or does it mean something else, something that might propel her forward?
It feels like:
Sitting in a crowd, waiting for your number to be called before taking the road test;
On a boat, seasick from lulling waves that slyly turn aggressive;
A reverse crystal ball, a time machine, a rapid rocket back to relief … or perhaps resentments.
Missing something — or someone.
Autumn 1994, about the time of my “at home” feeling in Harvard Square.
At some point during my first week at Tufts — the university I had adventured toward while my family was still on the other coast — I sat in the middle of Harvard Square, waiting for a friend before taking the T back to campus. And all of a sudden, I experienced a feeling of ultimate contentment, a feeling of being completely “at home.” Oh, don’t misunderstand me: There was a knot in my stomach, but it was an entanglement of excitement that would perhaps unravel and become slack instead of taut. I think it was just that I knew I was on a good journey — whatever that meant — and this was the next step.
Me, the great-granddaughter of someone who was so homesick for her native Norway that her husband — my great-grandfather — sent her and her three children away from Montana and back to the homeland for six months. Me, the daughter of a man raised in the depressed logging town of Aberdeen, Washington and at 75 can’t quite shake its hold on him despite fleeing to skyscrapers of success. Me, who 25 years later, has lived in Seattle, Boston (twice), Charlotte (twice), New York City (twice), and Dublin, Ireland. Me, who has birthed two children who have lived in 7 different homes and now attend universities in two separate states where they have never lived until now.
Homesickness: It’s all a part of the family lore.