Time Travel
By noon I will be boarding an American Airlines plane at O’hare. After enclosure, sardine like, in the silver-aluminum tube, with good fortune, I will emerge two hours later in North Carolina. I expect the air to be warmer and scented with pine needles. The people will be vaguely familiar with respect to voice inflection, the gentle Southern drawl. I will pick up the rental vehicle. As I proceed on I40 from the airport to Durham my awareness will register disappearance, the absence of much that I remember from my youth. Time is an eraser. Passing by the Research Triangle Park the Monsanto Research lab where I worked for two magical years is long gone. Exiting I40 into town I can see the bones of the American Tobacco company in the distance. My father worked there for his whole career. Indeed tobacco sustained our family, not to speak of laying the foundation of wealth for Duke University. And the Honeys Drive-In within sight of my accommodation at the Holiday Inn is gone. Swept away by a bulldozer. A McDonalds has taken it’s place. Only memories of my high school years and of that drive-in remain
I am a foreigner. I’ve been away too long, from the land of my beginning. It has changed and I have changed. When I emerge from the American Airlines jet–I will have to begin again, taking nothing for granted in the remains of my past, and in the past of this place.
So, I will arrive disarmed, without guarantees of any kind, on a quest as I spend several days with my remaining family members. Listening, touching, getting to know one another again, and this place again. Time displacement. The new comes —- replacing the old. Alone. New connections wait to be formed.
2 thoughts on “Time Travel”
Certainly can still get biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Maybe even fried bologna. There will be a couple Orio-cows in the fields.
I believe that I did see fried baloney on a menu once. Must have been a long time ago. Had Chicken & Waffles with a side of collard greens for dinner tonight.