Once unshackled from the accustomed discomfort of our exile, The Muse and I cruise quite competently. The unshackling might involve some elements of a domestic Stockholm Syndrome. Where ever I might hang my hat is bound to feel home-ish, at least a moderately-sticky status quo. I suppose I protect myself from much potential delight by clinging onto the more recently familiar. But family really should be different.

I am one fortunate man to have two thoroughly delightful, adoring children with partners who even seem to like me, and a grandson who’d been practicing making a finger mustache, anticipating his grumpa’s mysterious arrival. We all take to each other easily, melting time separated in some fraction of one of those famously slowpoke New York Minutes. Time works differently in families.

The Muse announced to our waiter that we were celebrating a reunion, but I’d been thinking of it more as a home-coming. Nobody wore crinoline or boutonnieres, or mimicked wallpaper, but this was no mere reunion. The union had not been separated except by space. Only home had diverged. Tonight it reconnected.

I sometimes wonder why I always feel so insecure coming home, as if I might be rejected there or perhaps found out to be unworthy of my story. I need not worry, yet I worry. Perhaps it’s all about humility or a deep sense of disbelief that such perfect synchrony could somehow sustain itself when separated by a physical continent and so much time. The relationship seems to pick right up where ever it left off last time; a mutual admiration society.

I aspire to shrink the physical distance, to ditch the exile that seemed simple survival when it began. It threatens nothing but more frequent satisfaction. Nobody ever died of that coming home.

©2013 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: Living, Exile, Homebound