NWA cancelled part of my flight, both ways. It's not that I got in twelve hours late, it's that I got in at midnight with a three hour drive to make. It's that the lateness involved a four hour layover in overstimulating O'hare airport (which has a museum store kiosk of creams and books instead of a shop full of cool toys. Oh woe is the he, the kiosk boy).
Yesterday, was almost a total write off, but I got lots of sleeping done. And it's always good to go back to where you came from, Indianapolis, and see how far you've come. (Or you realize that you've been away so long that you could never find your way around alone. Sometimes I'm like the girl in Labyrinth, when they move the lipstick arrows on rocks around. Where, oh where, is David Bowie.) And then, sit down to dinner with your gorgeous great Aunt Mary only to be told, in that stoic understated tone that is supposed to go with that Indiana accent that burbles up in me as graciously as a southern drawl, that I "have done a lot." Most ninety year olds don't seem to know what they are eating for dinner. Aunt Mary knows everything.
And I think you have to manage more than your first four years in "the middle" to be able to articulate the kind of reserved warmth and courageous caution that comes with Indiana talk. Even reading Vonnegut and James Whitcomb Riley from early childhood cannot replicate, I'm sure, the long term effect of living in this dialect.
Aunt Mary gave me a beautiful crystal bowl for my wedding last year; it is a family heirloom, I think my first one aside from my desk, her kitchen table, from Great Aunt Ida who wasn't really my aunt. A year after my marriage, I was prompted by my mom to tell this sharp eyed delicate about my recent work at the shoe museum. Everyone loves Aunt Mary; everyone wants to please her. I told her about my volunteering as her sparkling eyes filled me with pride like I was an heirloom bowl. When I told my Mom last year, she already knew what a "docent" was. So did smart Aunt Mary. Later on, she pulled out some photocopied pages with some underlining and notes added in her tiny beautiful handwriting. It's provenance, said my Mom, proud either of the fancy word or the fact that my family contributes heavily to my research files as much as my recipe book. I wonder if my Mom realizes that she will one day command the same respect as Aunt Mary.
Indianapolis is so detestably in the middle, but I love being in the middle of rooms filled with my family. Too much soggy pasta casserole, cheap beer and bad floral dresses. This what I come from. The midwest. The Nascar zoom around the track, and the hoosier all-star squeak on the court. A line of pace car princesses. I drive my own race car, now. I don't dribble, I just travel. I never drop the ball and my pit stops lube me up and rotate tires in record time (unless the airlines get to cancelling flights.)
We finally got into the Buffalo airport ready to find our car and speed across the border towards our lonesome cats. The car park attendant was chatty. Responding to a strange typo on our parking vouchers, he immediately connected the confusing word to the American government getting "worser and worser." In Boston, yep, I might expect random political ranting from the workers. But in Buffalo, so close to two hour line ups for security check points, I was surprised. I decided to soothe this rebel in a box by sharing some wisdom passed down by my Aunt Mary's photocopies. My great, great Aunt Martha used to say, "If there's no apples, there'll be punkins. He always makes it right some way." The parking man took our voucher and said he looked forward to the pumpkins.
The other thing my Aunt Martha is remembered saying: "Honey, crying is mighty hard work and mighty poor pay, I'll tell you." Well, Aunt Mary, I've done a lot of that, too. Maybe just enough to fill that bowl with tears. But on the other Indiana side of my family, another Aunt insists I'm related to Johnny Appleseed. Whether or not he was doing the lord's work or was "improving" the land for steep profits for himself and homesteadders, if there are not apples, you'll be a pumpkin by midnight at the buffalo border.
My saying: "Roaming free with the buffalo might get you trampled."
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