Let's Take the Long Way Home

A teeny slice of the sprawling memoir

I can’t stand to look too closely what is happening in Los Angeles right now, so this is a picture of a quieter time when I was looking for our son, as I did in those days. I lived with my hair on fire, combing the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, my husband at the wheel.

My sister said that I told her, “My addiction is him, and the phone is my needle.”

I can’t remember saying this, but when you put it like that...

I texted my son’s number repeatedly throughout the years, and it played like something like this.

Me: Where are you?

Me: I will find you. Don’t make me come find you.

Me: ???????

Me: Answer me, Mister. THIS SECOND!!!!

Me: I’m going to start texting your friends.

Me: Daddy is on the way.

Son: Sorry, Momma. My phone died. Sup?

Who’s the unhinged one?

***

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.”

― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

I’ve read this memoir twice, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, and I love it so much. It’s about Gail Caldwell’s friendship with the late Carolyn Knapp who wrote another memoir I adore called Drinking: A Love Story.

“When you quit drinking you stop waiting.”
― Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

***

It’s been a few years since I’ve read either, and I recall a student doing a presentation on Caldwell’s book years ago, and I was reminded why I loved it so much. I am not even sure where it is now. Once, I saw it on my office shelf at the university, and I thought, oh I need to read that again, but it can be impossible to read for pleasure when avalanche of student work hits, so I sometimes carry around the books that mean something to me, meaning to read them again, or I set them down only to later think, where do I put that book?

Or I lend/give them to students who need them at an important time. I have so many books, that I lend/give away, and sometimes they come back to me.

Here is another quote that I love from Let’s Take The Long Way Home.

“Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.”

I was toppling into sadness one Lenten season. I am not religious, but I spent one Lent writing letters to my father and my son. I alternated days. It was 2021 and Dad had just died, and I couldn’t locate my son, which is still how it is these days. But I needed to find a way to connect with them, and writing them letters was such a comfort. They couldn’t interrupt, and I’d spent lifetimes being interrupted by both. I had done my fair share of talking and interrupting, too, but their personalities dominated the rooms. So I could talk to them by writing to them.

I think I wanted to track them somehow - to find them, to find a way to understand, and to make sense of things - maybe attempt to fill the hole of grief.

By chance, I listened to a brand new Modern Love podcast about location tracking loved ones, and here is the essay that inspired it about an Alabama mother and her California son by Arlon Jay Staggs

Every Move I Make, She’ll Be Watching Me

At 50, am I too old to be sharing my location with my mother?

These days, when I read about parents still wanting to track their adult children, it amazes me. I don’t track my other two kids, whose phone numbers have never changed. I don’t track anybody.

In the days before tracking, I did my own version of sleuthing/tracking by trying to see who my teenage son called or who had called him to sniff out nefarious bad influences. I needed to blame somebody, and I am ashamed to say that lasted into his mid-twenties when shit got real, and I was getting texts and emails from well-meaning parties worried about him, begging me to do something.

Yes, of course, I’ll do something! I was eager and ready to take the baton and save the day because I thought I had control. I thought I could wave my wand/baton/my something and banish bad behavior and right the ship and blah blah blah.

I wanted to save the day - be one of those hero moms. Ha. What a gross and egotistical thing to say, but I wanted nothing more than to walk through fire, as a friend advised me to do, and then I would have him back because that’s how it happened for her. She walked through fire and voila! Son fixed and all better living a responsible life fulfilled and hitting all the right benchmarks.

I dutifully walked through fire after fire expecting different/better results each time, and we all know what it means to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

So where do I begin?

Marcescence
Sometimes we hold on too hard;
cling to what should be released—
old, winter-worn, transparent
from time and weather, rattled,
beaten, tattered— it’s hard to
let the familiar fall
away, let new growth emerge – Elaine Olund

I was on a walk in winter in the Sipsy Wilderness of Alabama where the guide pointed out the trees with withered gold leaves clinging to the trees and said the word “Marcescence.” She said that in the spring when the new buds grow, they finally push off the dead leaves that refuse to let go all winter, resulting in lovely golden waterfalls all at once in the rivers and streams in the mountains, trails of floating yellow leaves swimming in the currents.

Marcescence is described as a “botanical phenomenon” where some trees and shrubs keep their dead leaves through the winter and into spring – a kind of hanging on is what I thought when I first heard the word, already clutching for a metaphor in my own life.

Was I the tree hanging onto the leaves of my children or was I a single leaf not wanting to let go of the tree of my son? Or did I just like the word – Marcescence – a word that I put to memory by saying “Marcia Senses - Marcescence,” thinking of Marcia Brady sensing trouble afoot with Jan, which is dumb but how my brain works.

I don’t know what I am – the tree or a leaf or none of it or all of it. I don’t know what my son is. He would have an answer delivered with obvious assuredness that the rest of us are just too slow to catch the meaning. All I know is I like the word. And I want it to mean something.

Marcescence.

I want our journey as mother and son to mean something, and I know it does, but as I write these words, I don’t where he is living or how he is living, and it’s been like this for more than a decade. You think you can bear it, and you do, and then it hits you.

But I wasn’t about to let go because letting go meant failure. It meant quitting. And when you’re raised like I was, the daughter of a college and professional football coach (who was not John Madden, but Joe Madden) on the philosophy of Vince Lombardi – the “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” motto, then quitting is not an option.

Quitting is for quitters – those who gave up.

How could I give up? Maybe writing this memoir (still shapeless and amorphous at 80,000 words) is an attempt to try again to do better. Maybe this is a story of atoning for the dignity I didn’t show my son when I was trying so hard to fix, manage, cajole, threaten, bribe, beg, browbeat, chase, do surveillance/due diligence – all in the name of rescuing him to restore him to a responsible human being in the eyes of society and the world, and of course, mine too.

A family portrait such a long time ago…

I know I’ve written this before, but another friend said to me once, “You don’t know your son’s journey. He’s bringing light to some of the darkest places you can’t ever go.”

I did go a few times to those dark places with him or to find him, and as I was once climbing through a chain-length fence near the 110 Freeway off Figueroa behind the animal shelter, following him to meet a guy who lived in a tent, he turned to me and said, “Hey, pretty good, Mama! You could make it on the streets.” It reminded me of how I’d pitch him duct-tape balls (to avoid broken windows) in front of our house when he was a boy, and he’d compliment me with – “Good Mama! Nice throw!” – a ploy to keep me pitching the balls to him.

That day by the 110 Freeway, I was carrying a few lunches from the Hollywood Food Coalition to deliver to places my son knew, but I didn’t. He led the way, and I followed. But my friend was right. I didn’t belong, and I was scared because it was cold and growing dark. Feral cats and kittens roamed the brush above the LA River and down the raw embankment. My son went into the tent and didn’t come out for a long time, and I waited as I did in those days.

While waiting and waiting and waiting some more, I told myself to relax as my anxiety began to ramp up - or in the words of my football coach father, “Get tough! Don’t be a quitter. You’re his mother.” Finally, Son came out of the tent and said, “Let’s go.”

I didn’t study his eyes because he was moving fast, and I was following him again trying to keep up. We made it back to the car where my husband was waiting with the dogs, irritated and worried. What took so long? Did we then take our boy to CVS or Dollar General? He liked those places, but he always wanted me to buy him Testosterone, and I refused. I would only buy Men’s Vitamins, toiletries, and food. I had my boundaries.

Afterwards, we would drop him off wherever he wanted to go – back to the LA River, Griffith Park with the musicians, Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, beneath the Silver Lake underpass at the 101 Freeway exit – it was never the same.

Sometimes, close friends will ask, “Have you heard from him?” or they send sightings, or news segments from 60 MINUTES of new treatments of ultrasounds breaking addiction cycles, or they don’t ask at all. They keep the focus on us and our other kids.

We’ve been at this for such a long time.

***

My father didn’t have time for drama or people with problems.

When he saw the novels that I read as a kid like Go Ask Alice or Lisa Bright and Dark, he would ask, “What are you reading that crap for? Why don’t you read Dale Carnegie? ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ That’s a helluva book.”

***

When addiction moved in and took root, I was determined to hold us together.

I considered addiction my foe that I would do battle on behalf of my son, and that I would win with the help of family. We would be a resilient front. The siblings would assist in the battle. We would save his life. How could we not win? We loved each other.

It wasn’t like Aunt Jeannie, my mother’s sister, I told myself, my beloved aunt, who sent me books, and whom I made a character in my first novel, Offsides, maybe to thank her, honor her, atone?

It wouldn’t be like Uncle Jimmy, my husband’s brother, who poured dollops of Jack Daniels in his coffee in the mornings before going off to shoot Married with Children.

I didn’t understand, although I should have, that the disease had been there all along.

Our boy deserved dignity when he camped beneath a tree in Echo Park, by the LA River, under the Sixth Street Bridge and on the scary street in Lincoln Heights and in Walter’s Truck that was haunted by a gremlin which made his clothes smell bad? Walter was a former football player who gave our boy a place to stay a few years ago, but those streets have been wiped clean.

Where is Walter?

Our son has always deserved dignity like all our sons and daughters. He goes back to Silver Lake a lot these days, the place where he grew up, but a place where we no longer live.

This illness was on both sides of the family. It was in our blood and bones, but we all still thought it was a matter of willpower and strength, and by God, who doesn’t deserve a glass of wine or beer at the end of a hard day?

But I gradually discovered I couldn’t influence anything.

Postscript.

Tracking.

I just watched a show on Netflix called Pørni or Pernille about a sister raising kids and dealing with life who still calls her late sister on the phone just to talk to her.

It’s really good.

Ram Dass has a quote called, “We’re all just walking each other home,” and I found this mural visiting our kids in Chicago.

I take the long way home to write stories.