I'm home at the parents' house near Philly for a short visit.  I blogged awhile ago about how The First gets homesick for State Where I Live Now, and if a big strong football coach can admit such things, surely so can I. 

I like State Where I Live Now.  I like my little house and my little vegetable garden.  As anyone who's ever lived near Philly can tell you, our region basically deserves all the bad press and snide joking it gets from everywhere else, but we love it anyway.

So I never think about these things until I drive across the Pennsylvania border.  But I do get homesick for Wawa, the only convenience store/gas station combo that should legally be allowed to operate within US borders.  And for good music on the radio, even with perhaps more Billy Joel than is strictly necessary.  And for people with Italian last names (this isn't some kind of bizarre prejudice, just a regional demographic fact that lets me know I'm home).  And for the peculiar defeatist-yet-proud-and-somewhat-hopeful attitude arising from years of insanely bad management on the part of the Philadelphia city government, which filters out to the rest of the region in interesting ways.  And most of all for a similarly oft-disappointed-but-still-hopeful phaith among sports fans that was phinally rewarded last October.  Never since moving to State Where I Live Now have I felt more homesick than I did on October 29, 2008, with MY team dogpiling on the pitcher's mound, MY Hall of Fame announcer (RIP Harry) shouting "Watch this city celebrate!" and an artlessly multi-racial, multi-class group that I recognize as MY people dancing for joy on Broad Street. 

This week's blog entries, then, will journey with me to the heart of darkness.  Because despite all the love for this place described in the foregoing paragraphs, I would never, ever, ever have come back here since moving to State Where I Live Now if my mother hadn't gotten sick.  Before she got sick, on at least three different occasions that my parents wanted me to come home, I persuaded them to come and visit me.  They like State Where I Live Now also, but my motives were selfish and cowardly.

What the heck am I afraid of?  Hiding behind the thin veil of an Internet pseudonym, I will explore just how difficult it is to come back to MY place.  Just to get from the Pennsylvania turnpike to my parents' house, I have to drive past the church I attended with The One, the place I met him, a lot of places we spent time together, and the place of business of some very nasty people who tried (and may yet someday succeed, in a roundabout way) to ruin my life with respect to The One for inscrutable reasons of their own. 

And the closer I get to my parents' house, the farther back I get in time.  I drive past the turnoffs for a lot of schools where I used to teach during the sleepless, frustration-filled adjuncting and job applying days.  And then there's the church I used to attend, followed in short order by the bar where I used to hang out with people from that church.  That is, before I somehow struck out with a guy I thought at the time was The One and was socially dismissed for not being good-looking and cool enough.  It wasn't until The One that I got the courage to go back to church.  I still miss going with him.  And I still sit at the back of the church, talk to no one, and run out the door the minute the service is over.  Dear Jesus, save me from your followers, and all that.  My faith survived one bout of being a social outcast; I'm not prepared to risk another.  Then I drive past a restaurant where my best friend and I used to be regulars, drinking, eating, laughing, talking, and bitching about men.  I've stayed home nearly every weekend night I've lived in New State.

And then I'm in my parents' neighborhood, driving the streets that I walked in pajamas the morning my grandmother died, consoled over the phone by The First. 

And then home.  Where my mother doesn't know me, or my father, or herself.  Where my father has stopped behaving like himself from the stress of caretaking.  Family, friends, love.  All gone.  Everything that started here either fizzled out here or fell apart once I left.  I'll be haunted by those demons every time I leave the house until I leave Pennsylvania again next week.

I love this place.  I miss this place.  If I didn't have to, I'd never come back to this place again.