Calling Home

The first thing I felt this morning was nostalgia, and I’ve only been in this place three days. That was long enough to add some new life-long memories to a place in my heart reserved for Cameron, my youngest son. It’s been way too long, longer than I remember, since he and I had seventy-two uninterrupted hours together. Part of me wants to stay, though my heart is calling me home.

We landed in Los Angeles Tuesday, missing the earthquake by just about two or three hours. We were actually kind of bummed about that. I’ve never felt an earthquake, don’t stand much chance of ever feeling one in Texas. I’ve had plenty of earth-shaking experiences, though. Like taking my youngest son 1,500 miles from home to find a place to live just one month before he moves away.

We found the place, by the way, the very first day. We both laughed about how men hunt and women shop. We took the first place we saw. It’s one of three 11x19 rooms just above an art professor’s really messy studio. (Do clean studios ever produce really good art?) He will share a bathroom and a kitchen with two other students who are never there, like he won’t be, either. The Craigslist advertisement read “Spartan conditions,” which turned out to be an artistic way of describing a 1930’s era place with rotting stairs, cracks in the walls, barely enough light to walk around and no AC. In LA, though, that’s where he’ll start. He loves the place, plans to paint the walls and make it his own. The smile on his face was like soul medicine; it did my aching heart good.

Finding a place and talking to the financial aid people at the Art Center College of Design seemed to quell the little bit of anxiety he felt about moving this far away. It’s where he wanted to go. I’d never even heard of the ACCD before he mentioned it. Apparently, a degree in film from there will go a long way in the world he’s passionate about exploring.

Yesterday, having already bagged the crib, we went to see The Dark Knight, at the Universal City IMAX. I’d been on those grounds before, over twenty-five years ago with a youth group from Abilene on a “mission” trip. I have few memories of that trip. I’ll always have yesterday’s.

After that, we took a drive up Mulholland Drive. Its breathtaking mountainside overlooks gave us a spectacular view of downtown Los Angeles and a little more perspective of the massive city my son will call home for the foreseeable future. In the middle of all those millions, a piece of my heart will live there now, too. I’ll have to come back and check on my LA heart when Southwest runs Internet specials.

We cut our traveling budget by being more careful about where we ate. Olive Garden saw us twice, the same one. Last night, over really good Italian flatbread, chicken parmesan and a so-so plate of fettuccini alfredo (I make the best), Cameron looked up and thanked me for coming with him. At 19, I let him swig the last drop in my complementary glass of way-too-fruity house wine. He almost looked a little too experienced at the swigging part. I swallowed my spit harder than he did the wine. Flatbread and wine, it was a communal kind of thing, you know.

We rediscovered something I always suspected, that we have more in common than I think I ever did with my dad at nineteen. We actually enjoy hanging out with each other. We played together with the Garmin while the irritating computer-generated holy-spirit-of-driving voice guided us around a city I’ve never driven, without ever getting lost (well, almost). We finally found the mute button and just read the directions. The radio stayed off most of the time. We talked and said “Wow!” more than once, gawking at the hilltop mansions humans from another world call home.

Our plane takes us back home tonight, at least for another month. Where will home be next month? What do you when one son you love more than yourself lives one place and the other son you love that much, too, lives 1500 miles away and your wife who loves you more than you love yourself sleeps right next to you every night? You reach down and pat your dogs on the head then you roll over and thank God that your heart is big enough to love that much, to stretch that far and to call more than one place, “home.”