Leaving on a jet plane

I spent the whole weekend with my folks because they're going back to Italy on Tuesday. (Well, not exactly. First they're visiting the baby again, then they're going back to Italy. But for all intents and purposes, Colorado may as well be Italy, right?)

I am not very good at this 'leaving' stuff.

Ani DiFranco has a song called 'The Arrivals Gate' that I just love because it's about the other end of leaving, the better part. Sometimes my aunt met my family at the airport when we came back in the summers. Sometimes I'm able to be there when my sisters fly back to town or a friend needs to be picked up. But sometimes no one is there and you have to find your own way home, or you're brand new and feeling your way out of the airport in your new town.  I can't count how many flights I've been on, how many times people went to see us off, all the airports I've bawled my way through. Heading down to the flightline was an annual event in high school. Inevitably somebody you knew and maybe loved was moving away. All the friends would gather in the little waiting room in the military airport and wait until she PCSed with her family for the fourth or fourteenth time. The last time I did this was with my friend V. We'd graduated by then. It was August, we were going to college, and not many of us were left. Then it was time to board and she disappeared and I wandered outside onto the hot flat strip of asphalt and thought about how unlikely it was that I'd see her again.

When my family moved away for the first time, I fidgeted in my vinyl airport chair, overcome with a heavy sense of importance. My grandparents were there, my aunts and uncles. Soon we would get on a plane and fly many many hours to the other side of the world. It was terribly exciting and just plain terrible at the same time. As we made our way to the stuffy tunnel to board, I turned around and saw my grandpa solemnly waving his handkerchief. Sometimes I wonder if he knew he wouldn't see us again.

Last night after putting up her curtain rods and unrolling her new Pottery Barn rug, K and I poured ourselves a glass of wine and talked about families who live far away. Her parents are in Thailand and want her to come home. My parents are in Italy and I want them to come home- although now they've been there 10 years and own a house and are quite accustomed to a cappuccino in the bar every evening. Isn't that home?

I'm fairly certain the reason Phillip and I never made it to China last year was because we didn't want to leave home. That's a sobering thing for someone like me to admit. I thought I was pretty good at picking up and moving. The thought of staying in one place very long reeked of the boring and mundane and Lord knows I wasn't going to have a boring life! My Army brat roommate and I would talk about that itch that happened every couple years, and the day we realized we'd been in Seattle longer than we had cognizantly been anywhere else. There were days when, yes, it was definitely time to be somewhere new.

But we didn't go. I didn't want to leave my grandma for a whole year, for one thing. And who would record Gilmore Girls for Rebecca if she was going to be out?  I was just married. I had an apartment filled with stuff and I liked being in the middle of it. I knew how to get from my house to Capitol Hill to Magnolia to Northgate, a complete 180 from the day I was dropped off on the UW campus and couldn't find my way to my dorm. When people asked me where I was from, I stopped sighing dramatically before launching into my "Well first there was Comiso and then there was Lajes..." story and started saying "Now I'm from Seattle." I had no idea how wonderful it was to be from somewhere. And I really really didn't want to leave.

I guess I can't complain about the free place to crash in Europe, but I really miss my mom and dad. I hate saying goodbye to them every summer. I hated crying in the Venice airport every time I flew back to school. I hate that I've never seen one of their big school plays or met the kids they talk about. I hate how my dad stands outside and watches me drive away because doesn't he know that if you are driving you should also not be crying???

(Think happy thoughts for their trip because, for all their appearances of world-traveler-ness, they dread airplanes and positively loathe the airlines. And we don't wish a week of listening to travel-industry-lambasting on my brother and sister-in-law, do we? Seriously.)