Home to Fargo for Easter. ...
[Dad]’s in a new house now. I thought I would miss the old house – it’s where I
grew up – but I realized right away how glad I was he’d moved. Not just so he
could have someplace new and sunny and bright – we’d been trying to get him to
move since my Mom died. No, it was just the relief I felt that I didn’t have to
go back there again, sleep in my old small room with my junior-high books on the
shelves, my Marvel decal of Captain America still stuck to a doorknob, the empty
smell of loss in every closet and every room, the dry weight of time holding
everything in place. Open any drawer, and there was forty years of compacted
history staring up at you. We had every Christmas in the living room. I played
piano in the living room every day. When Gnat came last year we hid eggs in the
living room. My mother died in the living room. The new house is modern and
bright, lining a cul-de-sac in the endless suburban sprawl of south Fargo. A
city that did not exist has grown since I left; the city that was there when we
lived on the north side, but it’s frozen, it’s done. It’s over. It cannot grow –
the airport on one side, the river on the east, the waste-treatment plant on the
north. By his new house stand two gargantuan churches, one built to resemble
some peculiar cross between a barn and a European cathedral. Our old church is
between North and South, a downtown church across from the old Kraft warehouse,
north from the Sons of Norway hall. The congregants who were incredibly old when
I was a little kid are still there – fewer in number, sometimes stooped, but
often just as ruddy and vital as before. A full house, which was nice. You can’t
imagine that the congregation is replacing itself at the needed rate. Once they
had Sunday school for every grade, but not anymore, I think. We sat in the
balcony. I took Gnat up a secret passage to a tiny door in the back of the loft,
and showed her the rope to the bell. The area looked as strange and forgotten as
it did when I rang the bell; like so much of the church it seems to have been
sprayed with some sort of time-thwarting fixative. I suppose when you use a
place once a week, and only then for an hour or two, it holds up well. I suppose
it’s good that we age faster than churches. At first it makes them seem behind
the times; eventually they seem outside the times.
Hadn’t seen the padre in a while; we’d caught up in the vestibule. When I
came up at the head of the communion line he gave me a wink. Afterwards, the
usual dinner at the Holiday Inn banquet room; ham in alarming amounts. On the
way out we ran into my third-grade teacher. My third-grade teacher, friends. She
looked about 50. She remembered me: I was such a reader! I thanked her for
teaching me, and walked a way a little dazed: I'm 46 years old. And I just ran
into my third-grade teacher. Back to Dad’s house to find eggs with Gnat’s
cousin. I packed, neatened the room. We'd taken out some afghans the night
before - one green, one blue, both knitted by my Grandmother decades ago. I'd
curled up under them as a kid; they were later draped around a chair in the
living room. Good as new. Can't shake 'em. Sometimes you actually get irritated
at the obstinate persistence of inanimate objects; it would be simple if they'd
just leave. Because here I am in my father's new house, staring at this letter
my Grandma wrote in wool. You can run your hands along it and pretend you're
touching her; you can imagine the day at the farm, with Grandma knitting in the
front room, Grandpa looking for the car keys so he can drive out and check the
progress of the crops, Folger's brewing in the kitchen, Eli loping off to the
barn to change the oil in the tractor, worrried about a pain he's been having.
But you'll get nothing out of them. Gnat has no idea of the blanket that kept
her warm, just as Grandma had no idea there would ever be a Gnat. It can drive
you nuts, the wishing. But what can you do? You remember, you pass it on, you
let it go. In the end it's just a blanket. For all I know Grandma kept the 1893
container because it was practical, and her dad got it from a man at the GAR
hall. The only object I think my Dad would ever miss was the piece of shrapnel
he got in the war, and had made into a wedding ring. Coffee and cake until it
was time to load up the car and point it east. I’d say we headed home, but Fargo
is home as well. From one home to the other, then; from the old home to the new.
An apt thing to do on an Easter Sunday, no? Let's ask the pastor of my childhood
church:
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