Split in Two

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It happens every summer. I get caught, for a time at least, between Plainfield, Vermont, and my home in suburban Chicago, a foot in each world as if I were stepping into a canoe as it drifts out into the lake while I am being split in two with one foot on land and one in the boat.

After a week at the Clockhouse Writers Conference (CWC) held in the idyllic confines of Goddard College just outside the quaint and sophisticated state capital of Vermont, I sit, usually in the bar at Burlington International Airport with a beverage, as I try to puzzle out where I belong.

I muse about the dorm room – with a shared unisex bathroom down the hall and the cafeteria about four city blocks away. I remember my first trip to Goddard. I was terrified that I would end up in a hotbed of militant feminists intent on emasculating me. I had an arrangement with my therapist that if I got desperate, she’d fly out and get me. I didn’t call. I fell in love with the experience instead. I became the token male member of a lesbian group. Talk about irony. For the first time in almost ten years, I found a place I truly fit, a place where I was loved and accepted for who I was, warts and all. Goddard has become the place I feel most myself. Each semester I returned – as much for the fitting in as for the education – until I graduated with my MFA in Creative Writing. Now I go back to the CWC every summer.

A week at Goddard both exhausts and energizes me, and I sometimes believe that if I stayed longer, I’d explode. That doesn’t mean, however, that I want to leave.

So I sit at the bar drinking Ketel One with too many olives in a Goddard-induced dream dreading the return of reality when my flight departs. The bar has wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Green Mountains in the distance. The haze on the mountains turns them from green to blue, to gray, and sometimes the mountains vanish completely, melting into the clouds. In the foreground are the runways and hangar of the Green Mountain Boys Air National Guard. The Green Mountain fighter jets take off and land occasionally, but more often play joyful tag, almost touching down one after another. Then, barely above the tarmac, they accelerate abruptly into the ether and shatter the air with sound.

I sip my drink, munch on olives, and grieve the end, for another year at least, of intense connection. But as I sip, I know that people whom I love just as deeply wait for my return to the Chicago suburbs where I live in a Father Knows Best suburb. The houses are well kept, tree branches intertwine over the street, and the sun shines golden on us all year long. Everyone waves when they drive by or stops to chat if we’re walking. We all pick up after our dogs and mow our yards regularly, and we have block parties in the summer with grilled steaks and ice cream.

Too soon I become entangled in pre-flight security screenings and the wait for my plane to board. The woman who has checked tickets for the last few years is so cynical she makes me laugh. She says she won’t answer the phone on her day off or after six at night because her boss might be calling her to come in for extra work . I always check in on line and get an aisle seat. She refuses to have the internet in her home – and she certainly won’t fly. The TSA screeners in Burlington are . . . vigilant. This year they scold me for packing my carry-on too densely as they unpack it with their blue gloves. The battery charger for my camera draws their attention because I stuck it into a shoe.

Years ago, when I first flew out, even before Nine- Eleven, the security screeners treated all the returning Goddard students as if we were terrorists, ready to blow up plane after plane. Now they are more polite. They insult us with their condescension as they explain as if to three year olds why they must look more closely at our luggage. They are always my first step back to a reality where people don’t trust and hold each other up.

Then I sit at the gate. This year the plane was delayed for an hour. Weather messed everything up across the country. I sat and read until we boarded the plane , and then sat in my aisle seat next to a young couple who live in Joliet.

I survive the trip. I’m happy to be home. Yet part of me always longs for Vermont.