For years, well-meaning friends have asked when my son is coming home. Or, more recently, if. For years, I've shrugged.
When I moved to Chicago over 35 years ago, it may as well have been Japan, as far as my mother was concerned. Just as Japan, for me, when my son headed there almost a decade ago, may as well have been the moon. I don't know when I stopped saying I was "from" New York, or even adding it in as an explanatory footnote when somebody asked, but it's been a while. I'm guessing Matt still has to add the footnote when somebody asks him, if only because his distinctly Caucasian features are a dead giveaway.
As I write this, I am propped up on a sleeper sofa in what used to be my bedroom. The old twin bed with the bright swirls of color on the bedspread is long gone, as is the worn red carpet. The distressed wooden wall hangings are still there, though, painted images of a young boy in a sailor outfit holding a kite behind his back, and a young girl in a printed dress holding an empty bird cage, a discolored knot of wood nestled into the crook of her foot like a soccer ball. I never flew a kite, never owned a bird, never played soccer, but my gaze still clings to those wall hangings when I visit. Comforting relics of a home so otherwise out of reach.
It's been 13 months, a long 13 months, since I last visited, and I find a city that is deeply scarred. Mobile morgues and body bags piled on the street will do that to a place, I suppose. On a beautiful and warm early spring Friday on the lower west side, the path meandering along the banks of the Hudson River were startlingly empty. The gleaming post-9/11 buildings and landscaping seemed to cry out for attention. There were more dogs than I remember, though. The pandemic puppy boom is universal. I remembered walking these paths with my son years ago, when he was at NYU, when I thought he would just stay there, make New York his home, pick up where I had left off.
The other night, I had a dream that I was being chased by a tsunami, like the one, I suppose, that wreaked havoc in Japan just before Matt went over there, for what I had assumed would be a brief stint. As I ran through my dreamscape, I kept looking for Matt; he was the only one I couldn't see in the chaos. Everybody assured me he was fine.
As it turns out, he is more than fine. He is engaged. He emailed us -- me, his dad, his siblings -- to tell us the news, fearful, I think, that we would be disappointed. That he is not coming "home" any time soon. But we are thrilled for him, and for our soon to be daughter/sibling, Haruka (spoken with an accent on the Ha, like Hanukkah, oddly). Mazel tov, Matt and Haruka, or, as they say in Japanese, according to Matt, congratulations!
No more shrugging necessary. Matt is home.
