I’ve called many places my home little darlin, but I only come from one

July 18, 2017July 18, 2017 Joseph Lyttleton2 Comments

On the wall next to the pool table in the basement, there was a plate cover that always hung loose. It had been missing the bottom screw for as long as I had memory and, when slid back, would pivot up to reveal an empty black hole behind it, an opening for a non-existent outlet. In the eyes of a child, it wasn’t just a gap in the drywall, it was a secret cave, a limitless expanse; a hiding place.

I used to fold up a dollar bill, even a fiver on the rare occasion I accumulated such a bountiful harvest, and tuck it into the crevice between the wall and a pair of loose wires. My hope was that I would forget about the stash and then some day, a few months later, maybe years, I’d come across it again, and it would be like finding buried treasure. The only problem was, the moment I slid the cash behind that plate, I thought of nothing else. The bill never remained back there long.

As I grew older, the game – and I suppose that’s what it was, a game I played with myself that I lost every time – took on a different objective. Now, instead of hiding the money so that I could stumble upon it at some unknown date, I hoped for enough willpower to resist removing the money at all so that, in some unknown future after my family had left, a different kid from a different family, would find the treasure.

I can’t say when I was first struck by the realization that I would not always live in that house, that my family would not own it forever, but it must have been fairly young. Our home was perpetually in a state of flux. I never had visions of growing up to raise my own family there.

I wish I could say that the last time I stuck money behind the face plate, I left it, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure I did not. I was consistently cash strapped and there was a new Spider-man comic to buy every week. Still, it’s fun to imagine some curious six-year-old playing around in that basement one afternoon and somehow managing to uncover my secret stash. It would be the greatest discovery of her young life.

Following the diaspora of my siblings and my parents’ divorce, my mother and I moved into a two-bedroom, loft apartment in the middle of Lawrence for my senior year of high school. Many different homes would follow. Over the ten years of my project, I lived in thirteen different apartments, some by myself, most with roommates, all of varying degrees of comfort and disorder.

These homes have been, at times, shabby and, at others, luxurious. I’ve had isolated apartments, and I’ve lived in the heart of the city. I’ve gone from having two floors all to myself to sharing one bathroom with six people. Whatever the amenities, wherever I’ve ended up, like a hermit crab making use of a found shell, I’ve made it home in my own way.

After three years in Brooklyn, I’ve yet to fully settle; I still exist in the vapor. No art on my walls, cardboard boxes serving simultaneously as storage and tables. I live like someone with one foot out the door because that’s all I know. In just over a month, I’ll move again.

I tried. When I settled into my first Brooklyn apartment, I purchased a desk and a chair, and a bookshelf. I picked up some cheap pictures from a street vendor and even bought a wall clock for some inexplicable reason. I made an effort to spread out, to accumulate, to slip into the nooks and crannies and feel attached. It didn’t take.

The clock’s batteries have been dead for two months.

Home is a bed

I have this kind of strange habit when I’m traveling, I’ve had it for as long as I can remember. As a child at camp and even now on a trip, I’ll refer to whatever temporary facility I’m staying in as “home.” If we’re out and I’ve forgotten something at the hotel, I’ll say, “I’ll just head home real quick and grab it.” It’s a quirk that occasionally earns an eyebrow raise, but I’ve done it all my life and I don’t think it’s so strange. Home is where I lay my head down to sleep.

I love having my own space, I crave it, but I’m not too picky about what the space should look like. I just need to be able to find my peace.

Living with other people can complicate that, not everybody was meant to be a roommate; or, at least, not my roommate. Sometimes I’ve made a home in an apartment despite living with people with whom I had nothing in common. Other times, it’s the people that have made an apartment home.

Home is a base, a starting point, a fixture to which I latch a tether, however temporarily. Like a climber reaching for the next anchor point, I’m always searching for somewhere new to fasten a hold.

Yet, home also remains, stubbornly, Lawrence, Kansas, and a blue, three-story, behemoth of a house ever sliding incrementally down a steep hill, now the residence of a family I’ve never met.

Lawrence: home to the University of Kansas and its rabid basketball fan base; home to the best hillside views in the entire state (maybe the only hillside views); home to artists, writers, and musicians; home to liberal reactionaries and a church on every other block; home (for a time) to William S. Burroughs, Erin Brockovich, and Langston Hughes; and the home of a family of seven, sort of okay.

View from Campus — Pictured: Setting of beloved TV movie, *The Day After*

The weekend before my next leap into the unknown, I’ll fly to Kansas to spend a few days with some of my family that now includes three nephews and a niece.

It used to be, when I’d return home for a short trip, I couldn’t walk downtown without running into a half dozen people I knew, just by chance. Now, when I go back, unless specific plans are made – and even then – I can go the whole visit without seeing anyone I know outside of my family. I’ll walk into an old haunt and anticipate hearing my name called only to be met by the disinterested stares of a whole new generation.

With each passing year, Lawrence, the small town in which I spent 22 years, transforms into something increasingly unfamiliar, even though in structure and physical layout, it remains persistently recognizable.

There was a time when my family name carried some cachet among (the less reputable) establishments in the town (in no part due to me), but those days have mostly passed. I suspect name dropping one of my siblings would only be met with confusion nowadays. As a college town, Lawrence is a constant churn of population turnover. You don’t have to leave a place for it to leave you.

Time will change our relationships with everyone and everywhere. I haven’t lived in Kansas in a very long time, and each visit reminds me of that fact. Yet, I haven’t broken the habit of saying, “I’m heading home” when I talk about returning to Kansas. I will never live there again (and I shake my head in dismay at almost every bit of state politics that makes national news), but it remains for always, my home.

My first home.

I’ve done this silly thing over the years, before leaving some of my apartments: I’ll take one of my original 10 Cities/10 Years stickers and press it directly above the door frame on the inside of my closet. It’s unlikely anyone will ever find them, but who knows. Maybe some curious 26-year-old will be messing around in their room one afternoon and somehow manage to uncover my surreptitious memento.

It will be the stupidest discovery of her young life.

One Hundred Days

May 23, 2017May 23, 2017 Joseph Lyttleton3 Comments

One hundred days from now, if all goes as hoped, I will say my goodbyes to New York City, my home of three years, and board a flight to Spain.

There’s still so much unknown, so little figured out. A place to live, a means of income, even my exact day of arrival, it’s all still up in the air. If past moves are any indication, I’ll likely be working out the details up until the last minute. This is the circular motion by which I achieve momentum.

I have no idea how long I’ll be gone. After living so long with a precise schedule and definitive goalposts, I’ll admit, it’s disorientating to have such a nebulous future ahead of me. It’s an altogether fresh challenge, to take a dive without knowing the depth of the water.

I am someone who likes structure. This might seem counterintuitive considering how tumultuous and unpredictable much of my life has been as a result of 10 Cities/10 Years. But that project, for all its winding roads and uncertainty, still provided me structure, a guide rail.

As I’ve said frequently, the project was created to push me out of my comfort zone. With my natural shyness, my social anxiety, pushing myself towards situations where I had to meet new people and acclimate to new social situations forced me to develop mechanisms for adaptation. Evolve or die, that sort of thing.

I remain fundamentally the same person as I was when I left Kansas: socially awkward, blithely misanthropic, and utterly devoid of charm. But when the situation requires it, I can muster enough energy to seem downright personable, and that’s what a decade of traveling has developed in me. That, and alcoholism.

(I do have a tendency of drawing out fellow misanthropes; we sense each other’s hatred, a kind of Hadar, if you will.)

If 10 Cities/10 Years was about pushing myself to face my social anxiety, then this next journey is about challenging my reliance on structure.

It’s the rare person who actually thrives on total uncertainty in their life, and I am not among their tribe. Even in new surroundings and in the midst of near constant disruption, I seek out patterns, familiar routines that can ground me. A little chaos can be exhilarating, to be sure, but living without any parameters, well, that’s frankly terrifying.

I grew up in Kansas. If you mention that state name to almost anyone in the United States – hell, in the world – they’ll have one reaction: “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Ask any random person to name five images they associate with Kansas, four of them will be Wizard of Oz related, and the fourth would either be a Bible or a basketball (in Lawrence, arguably the same thing).

At the core of the state’s association with flighty redheads and yippie dogs is perhaps the most feared singular image in all of nature, the tornado.

I’ve shook in California earthquakes, witnessed the immediate impact of a hurricane in New Orleans, and soldiered through my share of blizzards. Yet, whenever the subject gets broached among people from any region of the United States, they all agree: tornadoes are the scariest.

I was always confused when people who grew up in the paths of hurricanes claimed to be more afraid of tornadoes.

“You realize hurricanes are just massive tornadoes, right?” I’d counter.

“Yeah, but you don’t know where a tornado’s going to be.”

And that’s the crux of it. Although most natural disasters will cause far more death and destruction than the average tornado, the unpredictability of a twister, the inescapable chaos that it represents, is far more potent as a symbol of terror. We watch forecasts for hurricanes and blizzards, we know where fault lines exist. But tornadoes, well those sons of bitches just come and go as they please.

I get asked from time to time, usually with a faint glimmer of horror in the inquisitor’s eyes, “Have you ever seen a tornado in person?”

Yes, yes, I have. More than a couple of times. Although, in truth, most of the time when a tornado warning blared from the sirens, I was nowhere near it and only ever saw the resultant damage a day later if we intentionally drove by to view it. A tree was probably dislodged, a fence knocked down. If it were a particularly bad storm, we might see a branch thrust through the window of some stranger’s house. For most people, life went on as normal.

I’ve never lost anything or anyone to a tornado, which probably explains why I don’t fear them and, in fact, why I love cyclone weather. First, the sky turns a gnarly shade of green or purple. As the atmosphere begins to tingle, the air gets warmer, but steady cool breezes whip through neighborhoods, the narrow passageways between houses focusing the wind like rushing rivers. A mix of rain and hail usually – but not always – pours down as the sky turns black as midnight, the clouds swirling in acrobatic maneuvers fit for the Olympics.

Then, somewhere, maybe near, maybe far, something fearsome touches down, twirling wisps of air sharper than any knife. It’ll cut through your car or home, chop down a hundred-year old tree or fling a piece of flimsy paper into stone. Few things in life actually warrant being called “awesome.” This is one of them.

Pure, unbridled chaos is a thing of beauty, stunningly so. The way you felt when your sixth grade crush would talk to you, that’s approximately the same sensation as the shaken nerves that burble in your gut when you and your college roommates stand atop Mount Oread watching a tornado slide up 15^th Avenue and raze an apartment complex you’d been at only the previous weekend.

Pray all you want, it’s never stopped a tornado. Is it any wonder it’s called Mother Nature? She’s in control.

In a little over three months, I will begin the next major journey of my life, aimless, no control. No project, no guard rails, no final destination in mind (except, you know, for the big one they made all those documentaries about). Circumstances and chance will determine where I end up and how long I’ll be there.

What comes next will be the greatest challenge of my life. Major changes should always strain us. If I ever reach a place in my life at which I no longer feel any anxiety in my gut, I know I’ve grown too comfortable, too complacent. There could come a day when I’m ready to feel that sort of calm, but I’m not there yet. I’m still chasing storms.

Have you ever seen a tornado in real life? Keep reading, you will.

Wondering what 10 Cities/10 Years is all about? Read the full story.

Notes From the Past: Family, Love and Turkey Bowling

February 19, 2015May 1, 2015 Joseph Lyttleton1 Comment

It’s not a secret that when I have completed my first year here in Brooklyn – the final year of this project – I plan on immortalizing my experiences and encounters in a book. For the past few months, I have been slowly chipping away at the first couple chapters. I don’t know how much of what I put into these first drafts will appear in the final product, but it’s necessary to at least put words on page.

I’m pulling predominantly from my memories for this book (at least at this stage), and unsurprisingly I’m finding a number of holes. Whether that’s due to time or whiskey, I can’t say. It’s fine either way because one of the themes of the book is the way memory distorts and changes with time. Still, to appreciate how much they have changed I need to have a reference point.

Tonight, I dug out a pile of old journals. These are poetry journals which I’ve been writing since I was in high school. You could follow the ups and downs of my life by reading through the years of my shitty poetry. You shouldn’t do that, but you could.

On rare occasion, I broke with the format to free write about my life at the time. No, I didn’t keep a diary. Okay, I sort of kept a diary. But it was done very irregularly. During the summer before my senior year, while living in Washington D.C., I wrote pages upon pages of angst-riddled notes about the perilous state of my relationship with my girlfriend and my loss of faith. If I was a smarter man, I would set that shit on fire.

And then there was the first year of this project, Charlotte. On Thanksgiving weekend, my brother, Daniel, was getting married and I flew back to Kansas for the first time since I moved. While I sat in Charlotte Douglas International, I began writing out my thoughts about all that I had been through in the past 6 months and all that I was dreading about this return to Lawrence (mostly family).

Long before I had created this website, I was already touching on the many themes that I’d still be writing about years later: Same-sex Marriage (I was always for it), atheism and religion, travel, and politics (or lack there of: “I have no real interest in politics. I don’t see why you need to be of one political party or another to want to cure AIDS.” Oh, honey.)

Going back through these old notes was actually a revealing read. My wanderlust and insecurities are on full display within the pages, though, tellingly, nowhere did I mention 10 Cities / 10 Years as that idea was still nascent in those early months in Charlotte.

Much of the first few pages is consumed with my thoughts on family drama that was unfolding at the time. There’s always family drama, but reading these pages reminded me just how much drama was going on back then.

It wasn’t all family, though. I also spent a considerable amount of ink scribbling about my love life.

“H– picked me up just after 8:30 and took me to the airport.” H– was a woman I dated briefly before breaking it off who was trying to convince me to get back together. Clearly, I was taking advantage of that situation.

I also spent some paragraphs on the end of my 2-year relationship with my college girlfriend and my belief that I was perhaps not capable of succeeding at romance. I was 22, of course I was nihilistic: “I like flirtation. I like friendship. I enjoy sex. But I don’t want to be responsible for someone else, and I don’t want someone else being responsible to me.”
Could I be anymore cliché?

Alternatively, there’s a running fixation throughout the pages with having a meaningless sexual fling that weekend, either with an old high school crush or a complete stranger. Spoiler alert: Nope.

In fact, there’s a lot of wishful thinking in these words. A lot of forward looking. I had enough self-awareness to undercut my most grandiose prophecies with sarcastic asides and I had a persistent belief that nothing interesting would ever happen to me. But I was consumed with thoughts of my future and change. I wrote about New York City being my “betrothed” city, but I knew I would live other places first.

I certainly didn’t get everything right: “Home. Will Lawrence always be home? In some form or another I suppose…”

Already, I was obsessed with the idea of being removed from Kansas. Even though I had been gone less than 6 months, I referred to this trip with only slight irony as a “prodigal return.” I wanted so very bad for this weekend to feel epic, for my time away to have changed so much, both in who I was and how people thought of me. But a part of me knew it was a lie: “I am well-traveled, just not well-lived.”

After landing in Kansas City, there is an account of an awkward drive to Lawrence with my father and his new wife. At one point, they tell a seemingly off the cuff joke about their wedding which I suspect is actually rehearsed. When they retell the exact same joke a few hours later with identical wording, my suspicions are confirmed. (I also noted their indifference to a new album by Sufjan Stevens that I was telling everyone about at the time.)

In Lawrence, we had leftover Thanksgiving dinner with my brother, Steve’s, wife’s family before the younger generation headed out to the local Lawrence “hick” bar, Coyote’s. (I don’t believe it exists anymore.)

That’s pretty much where that story ends. I didn’t write about the wedding (the siblings all took shots before the service in the rental car), or about my return to Charlotte. Like I said, I’m an inconsistent journaler.

Before I finished, though, I did spend more than a page on what can only be described as the highlight of the trip: Turkey bowling.

It’s exactly what it sounds like (and exactly what you’d expect at a bar called “Coyote’s”). After both my brother and his wife took their unsuccessful turns, I was up. You might think bowling a turkey would be a rather mindless activity, but based on how much I wrote, there was clearly a lot of calculations involved. I really don’t think a summary would do it justice, so:

...the thought of throwing the turkey is not coming [up with] positive results. I imagine being too weak to pick it up, unable to throw it more than a few feet, or worse, losing control of my throw and sending the cold, hard turkey into the face of some spectator, smashing their nose and ending the festivities. I can be fairly certain nothing that interesting will happen, but still, the thought gives me pause...

I am not certain how to hold the turkey. It seems gripping the whole bird with both hands would allow for the best aim, but the awkwardness would make it hard to throw with much power. The strap does not appear to be very strong and aiming the turkey would be harder, but it would likely be easier to gather momentum, and since the prospect of watching the turkey land only two feet in front of me is seeming highly probable, I opt for power over accuracy.

Fully prepared to make an ass of myself (as prepared as one can be) I reel back, bring the turkey around in a parabolic downward arc and release. The strap breaks in mid swing, the turkey flies three feet before hitting the ground and rolling a couple more before stopping anticlimactically halfway between me and the pin. Well, at least no one's nose is broke. I'm ready to move on, back to the bar and away from the festivities when the man in charge of bowling says I get another turn because the strap broke. Lucky me.

This time, new bird in hand, I decide to go the two handed route. At least, if I only get the bird a few feet, there will be no excuse to make me do it again. Pulling the turkey back to my right side like I imagine a shot put coach would recommend (if the shot put was ten times as big, not particularly round and once alive). I then take a few quick steps toward the line, turn my body and use the momentum along with whatever I can muster in my arms to launch the bird. The turkey flies, past the two foot mark, past my previous throw, past the spectators (and their noses) and to the pins. Strike! Hole in One! Home run! Touchdown! All those fucking pins are down, submissive, broken. Do not fuck with me.

I won a Corona pin because the t-shirts were all too big for me.

And that’s basically it. The wedding happened. All of the family members survived the weekend. Nobody’s cat died.

I’m not sure turkey bowling will make it into the final book, but reading back on those old memories, I was pleasantly surprised by what I had forgotten, what I remembered, and what I was thinking back then. I don’t completely want to punch my 22-year-old self in the face, and that’s the biggest surprise of all.

“After a day of flying, drinking, talking and turkey bowling, sleeping sounds wonderful.”

Well said, you dumb sonuvabitch.

Cheers.

Returning Home

October 14, 2013 Joseph Lyttleton

I’m sitting in an airport being barraged by an odd sight: T-shirts, fleeces and jackets emblazoned with the logos for the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs or the Kansas Jayhawks.

Granted, I’m in MCI, the Kansas City International Airport, so such sightings aren’t, in fact, all that odd. For the first 22 years of my life, if I went a day without seeing one of those team logos, it would have been quite out of the ordinary. Over the past 8 1/2 years, though, the spotting of a Kansas City area team logo has become a rarer happening, the kind of unexpected reminder of my birthplace that flashes by and then fades quickly into indistinct memory.

Since beginning 10 Cities, I’ve averaged 3 or 4 days in Kansas a year, usually to see the family, or returning for a friend’s wedding. We celebrated a brother’s birthday this year, bringing together the 3 of us siblings who live elsewhere back together with the other 2 and our mother who live in Kansas. Drinking, eating, joking, minimal-politicking and drinking ensued.

These return trips to Lawrence, Kansas tend to be wrought with tension as we are a family of temperamental temperaments and strong, differing opinions (plus, sometimes shit just goes bananas). However, even under the best of circumstances, time in Kansas never sparkles with that pretty nostalgia that so many other people seem to experience when they return to their hometown.

The house I grew up in has long been owned by some other family, while almost everyone I knew from high school and college has moved away or, more simply, I’ve lost contact with them. A few old friends are in the area and I do my best to see at least a couple of them when I’m back, but time corrodes bonds and there are only a select few with whom that connection can be re-established with relative ease. We all have friendships that don’t survive the distance, there’s nothing gained by denying it.

Seeing my family and dearest friends can be an absolute pleasure, as was the case during our all-day barbeque that consisted of a plethora of smoked meats, prolific alcohol consumption, Cards Against Humanity and an impromptu bonfire.

But every return to Kansas reinforces the same cold truth: This is not my home.

Boston is my home. For just a year, true, but no less so for that fact. My life is back there – my apartment, job, friends, books, whiskey – all the more so because my life is all about travel, progression, and Boston is my latest step forward. Sooner than I’m ready, I will be packing up and leaving Boston behind, but for this year between September 1st, 2013 and August 31st, 2014, I live in Massachusetts, I live in this present.

Lawrence, Kansas, as I have always said, is a great place to live, a fine town to have grown up in. But, just as I’ve also always said, I will never, ever live there again.

I return home, today. To Boston.

Home sweet home.

A photo of Martin Manley, a Kansas City sportswriter who blogged about his suicide.

“My mom said I was always a happy baby.” The Suicide of Martin Manley

August 19, 2013August 11, 2022 Joseph Lyttleton

[This post obviously deals with suicide. Do not read on if the subject makes you uncomfortable.]

Martin Manley killed himself.

This in and of itself isn’t so unique. Thousands of suicides happen without much notice. Manley was a public figure, a former sports writer for the Kansas City Star and editor for the website Sports In Review. However, what makes his suicide bizarre is that he created a website (no longer active; going to the URL now could subject you to a virus) to explain his reasons for his actions. The final thing he wrote was a post for SIR.

In his final post, Manley explains:

The reason for my departure is 100% within my ability to control. You see, earlier today, I committed suicide. I created a web-site to deal with the many questions a person would rightfully have. It’s called martinmanleylifeanddeath.com. It went live today. In my opinion, there is no question which you could conceivably ask that I have left unanswered on that site. My goal with this post is closure for SIR.

Martin Manley shot himself in front of a police station. His final post touched on some of his reasons, but mostly he seemed to just want to put everything in order. The website he created was split into 2 categories, ‘Life’ and ‘Death.’ I won’t try to summarize or pull quotes. There was too much there to be crammed into a single blog post. The man laid bare his entire existence, from beginning to end, and if people are interested, there are mirror sites where people can still read his writings.

There are two reasons this story caught my eye (besides for the sensational angle of it):

First, he was from Kansas. He says that he lived in Topeka and then moved to Overland Park. Both of these cities are about 30 minute drives (in opposite directions) from my hometown of Lawrence. While I haven’t lived in Kansas in years and I was never one to read sports stories in the newspaper, I have to imagine that I have a lot of friends and old acquaintances that were familiar with this man, maybe even regular readers.

Secondly, there was something he wrote in his Pictures section of the site:

These are pictures of me when I was around one. My mom said I was always a happy baby. It seems odd to me that would be the case considering I’m not sure I ever really learned what happiness was as an adult.

Emphasis mine. That really stuck out to me, because my mother has said the same thing of me. She says I was her “sunshine baby.” This has always struck me as odd because for as long as I can remember, I have dealt with depression. I’m sure for anyone who has dealt with lifelong depression it’s hard to remember a time when you could be roundly described as “happy.”

If this story blows up, and it likely will because of its odd, viral nature, it will almost certainly spur a conversation on suicide. I hope it does. But if the comments on related articles are any indication, the conversation may get buried in dross. As soon as a public suicide hits the internet, the opinions start flying: People should be allowed to kill themselves. People who commit suicide are idiots. Only God can help you fight depression.

Everyone brings their preconceived ideas to the topic and nothing of importance ever gets discussed. The conversation takes bunny trails off into topics such as “Is depression genetic?,” “Is suicide wrong?,” and “Is there a God?” Personal agendas get brought in and pretty soon no one is talking about what really matters: How do people who have suicidal thoughts cope?

There is no single answer for everyone, and I don’t feel like getting into my personal beliefs on the topic. (I’ve done so elsewhere.)

It’s that phrase that keeps coming back to me: “My mom said I was always a happy baby.” We all have loved ones in our life and we think we know them, we think that we know what they’re capable of. Part of the reason that suicides so often take us by surprise is that most of us pride ourselves on being perceptive, at least when it comes to the people in our lives.

The TV show House M.D. had an episode where a main character committed suicide. At the time, there was considerable online chatter about whether it was just for shock, many arguing there was no hint that the character was going to do it. But, as unexpected as the episode was for me, it also struck me as incredibly true. My own personal experience of suicide was with someone who I (and, I imagine, most of the kids who knew him) thought was the happiest, most well-adjusted person.

I wasn’t familiar with Manley. I’m sure as people unpack his website and his backlog of articles things will come out that will make his suicide “obvious” and easy to predict in that perfect 20/20 hindsight sort of way. And maybe he had hinted at it to his readers for a while, I don’t know.

But the broader truth is that suicide isn’t something we usually can predict, especially not with our loved ones. There are those who display early warning signs, but for every person on suicide watch, there is a ‘happy baby’ who takes their families and friends by complete surprise.

I think what Manley was trying to do (what the writers of House were trying to do too) is bring this difficult conversation to the forefront and get people talking. Your opinion on Manley’s actions are irrelevant. It happened. Where do we go from here?

If there is any one person in culture having this conversation the right way, it’s the stand-up comedian Maria Bamford. She talks openly in her routine about her Bipolar Disorder and suicide. One of her best bits is called “Stigma” and you can listen to it on Spotify. I can tell you that for someone with depression, it is one of the funniest, most cathartic comedy routines I have ever listened to.

I don’t know if society will ever be capable of taking on this topic in a way that doesn’t fall back on preconceived judgments and fears, but I hope that if anything positive can come out of Manley’s death, it will be a willingness to look at this subject with fresh eyes.

Let us not hide from this.

Family

September 18, 2012 Joseph Lyttleton4 Comments

I have been in Kansas. I’m not there, anymore. (Guffaw.)

For a long weekend, I returned to the state of my upbringing to attend the ‘marriage ceremony’ of one of my oldest and dearest friends. She and her husband had married in Las Vegas some months back, but this was their opportunity to hold a small, semi-formal ceremony with family and friends present.

The trip back afforded me the opportunity to spend time with my friend, her husband and her family. I also found a day to visit with my own family, my mother, two brothers and their respective significant others and my nephew. It should be no surprise that with the way I live my life, such meet-ups are rare events.

My Grandfather

The day before I flew back to Kansas, I received an email from my father with the not-unexpected news that my grandfather had passed. My father has been letting us know for some time that his father was not well and that doctors did not expect him to live much longer. The question was not so much, ‘When?’ but ‘How soon?’

The passing of my grandfather is a moment that brings into stark relief how distant I am from my biological family. My father’s family mostly all lived in California, and his parents in particular never left the city of Los Angeles. Though they immigrated from Mexico I know very little about their past and have found myself on multiple occasions being stumped by someone asking, “Where in Mexico did your grandparents come from?”

The truth is, I know next to nothing about the side of the family that gives me my surname. This is, of course, a fault of my own, having never invested much time in getting to know them or even asking my father about his family’s history. At the same time, it also represents the peculiar temperament of my immediate family, a group of five kids who have always seemed most comfortable disconnected from a whole, like islands in an archipelago.

I can’t speak for my other siblings, but for me, relating to my extended family has always felt perfunctory. I am the youngest cousin by some years on my mother’s side, and I am one of the youngest on my father’s, and generally removed from all by both physical distance and social placement.

The passing of my grandfather stirred a sense of melancholy in me, but I know it stems not from a sense of personal loss (as the tangible hole in my personal life is unfortunately minute) but because I know my father and his siblings are feeling an acute loss and I have little to offer in terms of comfort. Another familial trait: We do not mourn publicly.

Whatever little tribute I can give to my grandfather, Juan, it should be known that from him has come offspring of great diversity, children and grandchildren who are living lives that bespeak the American Dream, that same dream that presumably compelled him and his wife to move to the United States in the first place.

May that be his legacy.

Back To Kansas

With the knowledge of my grandfather’s passing fresh in mind, I boarded a plane to return to Kansas. I spent the majority of my first three days there with my friend and her parents. Being an outside observer of a family is always fodder for interesting rumination, particularly when that family is in the midst of a high-stress situation, like, for instance, preparing for a wedding.

The little things that are done or said may appear small and insignificant to the outsider, but these seemingly petty slights are magnified by the proximity and familiarity that exists in a family. I came into a house where the parents and the children were clearly frustrated with each other and even the natural pairing of married couples didn’t insulate each individual from at times being clearly flustered with their partner.

At the same time, the loving fellowship between these close family members was a totem on a shelf meant only for me to view from a distance. Unless I was there for the creation of a joke meme or had participated in some piece of mutual history, mostly I had to enjoy their revelries through a telescope. They are a family, with all the requisite ups and downs. But they are not my family.

The Sunday following the ceremony, I spent entirely with my family back in my hometown, Lawrence. Longtime readers of this site may recall that my returns home have not always been the most successful. Arguments, blizzards, missed flights, freak cat attacks have all found a way into the reunions. Any return to my hometown is always overshadowed by a aura of possible (probable) doom.

But we’re getting better at mitigating the more avoidable disasters. Political talk, even in this election season, was kept to a minimum. Other than an unfortunate conversation with my mother that took a turn for the contentious (for no reason other than the train took off and I never took the prudent move to jump off), the interactions between our family as a whole were remarkably amiable. It probably helped that we only saw each other for one day.

I have had various friends/girlfriends be the outsider on my family gatherings (including my recently wedded friend) and I can only imagine what kind of perverse Reality-TV-cum-Court-TV world we must look like when we get going at each other. I don’t feel particularly close to my family yet, in the sense that I can’t imagine being a part of any other family, there is a peculiar and deep closeness to the way we butt heads. Yeah, we’re miserable sods, but we’re miserable sods together.

My Family

But I left Kansas as I always do, as I always will, and returned to New Orleans, a new home, but my home nevertheless.

Traveling as I do can be exhausting and nerve-wracking and frequently lonely, but make no mistake: I lack not for family.

Family is the partner who drinks with me until the sun rises. Family is the cohort who eats shitty-but-delicious nachos from a dive bar not because it’s the only food that’s available, but because why would we want anything else? Family are the coworkers who hang out together long after clocking out. Family is the friend who confesses a past she’s never told anyone else about because she knows secrets are always safe with me. Family is a woman who makes me smile from 1,000 miles away.

And, yes, family is the people whose political, religious and musical opinions makes me want to scream.

Because despite everything, it’s all relative.