The things we write about after repeated goodbyes.
What do we write after a series of goodbyes with the same person? This week, I pose this question to you all. Perhaps the answer will come about in your poem, or perhaps it will come after. Perhaps no answer will come at all. Regardless of the outcome, I thought I would write about a series of personal goodbyes with the same person to possibly light something in you. (At the very least, you might end up learning about the second-floor layout of Glasgow International airport – the spot right before Passport Control.)
Once or twice a year for the last four years, I get on a plane from Newark, New Jersey, or sometimes JFK, and take a seven-hour flight to Glasgow, Scotland to visit my family. I am the only one who ever left, and my father picks me up at the airport with promises of bacon rolls once we get home. How is America? What is it like? We talk about the same things after the usual hellos at the airport.
I spend a week or so at home. Forty percent is spent recovering from jet lag. Ten percent is trying to remember Scottish Gaelic. Another ten percent is hearing my mother scold me for my “mid-Atlantic accent” and new “Americanisms.” Twenty percent is wishing we could put the fire on, because it’s the middle of July and it’s 54 degrees. Twenty percent is missing my father as he sits across from me at the kitchen table; we eat roast beef and hot liquified carrots.
The week or so passes. It is horrible, it is sad. I quiver between elation and total misery as I repack my bag. My sister tells me I am selfish for leaving because I won’t see the puppy grow up. And there’s meant to be a heatwave next week! Don’t you want to get a tan with me? My father potters around downstairs, reorganizing his war film collection in the lounge.
Then the day comes when we have to part. My mother has to work, suddenly. She throws a fruit loaf in my bag. I take it out – I can’t take it through customs, Mum. She cries about it in our hallway, says it’s just awful that they’d consider throwing away a wee fruit loaf. My sister plays with the puppy who, I’m pretty sure, doesn’t know her own name. She and I hug goodbye in the front garden. We remember we will see each other in our online dance class next week. It’s not so bad.
My father and I drive to the airport, missing each other as he slows down for a cyclist on this country road. We don’t make small talk; we don’t know how. We just try to listen to each other up close. We circle the car park three times because he can’t reverse into a spot. I carry my bags out the car and wish I’d eaten breakfast before I left the house.
What happens when we remember a series of goodbyes with the same person, in the same place? Their faces, at least for me, blend into each other. I see my father, as I sit here in my closet-turned office, and his “goodbye outfit” remains the same for all those slices of time in the airport, even though I know he owns more than one jacket – he owns two. His hands are in his jacket pockets, the zipper meets his collar. He stands like Mary Poppins, heels together, toes apart. He is about four feet from the entrance to Passport Control, and there is a grey pillar to his left, a vending machine to his right. As I hold him in a hug, he is forgetting where he parked his car. Nonetheless, I press my purse into my chest, pull my hair behind my neck. I take my father’s right arm and ask him, yet again; would you like to come with me? It’ll be fun. He smiles and he keeps his heels together. That would be lovely, he says, but your mother still needs me.
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