On No Longer Forgetting (a homecoming)

A strange thing happens when you reach your 30s in Appalachia. The people in your life who have been responsible for your formation — your parents, their siblings and friends, your teachers, and (if you have the luxury of time on your side) your grandparents start to share important facts about your personal history with more urgency than before. It is as though there is a danger of forgetting, of losing them in the nothingness.

You begin to inherit photographs and scraps of paper, relics that mean nothing to the outside world and everything to you. You start to see in them hints and guesses, signs and symbols of who you are to become.

I was sitting outside a dive bar in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood shivering in the winter cold when my dad told me about the first time he saw the ocean. He was almost 20 years old. It was the sound, he said, that first got his attention — that distinct advancing and retreating, swirling and crashing of waves only half-imagined by the boy he’d been in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Climbing over a sand dune, he was faced head-on with the unbridled power of the water (“just water,” he said, incredulous) tearing at the shore, clawing sand and earth back with it. It was then, he told me, that he came face-to-face with the infinite reality of God.

I watched my breath appear and disappear and scraped my heel against the pavement, guilty about ushering him off the phone too quickly so I could get back inside. The meaning wasn’t lost on me, but I’m ashamed at how easily I let it slip away.

Some time ago, it occurred to me that, in the not too distant future, I will no longer be counted among the young in my family. I will become a senior bearer of our name(s). My decisions, indiscretions, triumphs and failures will start to feature more prominently in the history of our people. Whether I like it or not, I will be responsible for my comings and goings, and for remembering where they stand in our way of things.

It was on the heels of that realization that I decided to leave D.C. and come home. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the house my great grandfather built for raising his family and where he took shelter from the summer sun that still punishes the South’s working class. There is hardware from an old outhouse affixed to nothing in the backyard, and from time to time, I daydream about the flowery newspaper cutouts my grandmother papered the barn wall with when she lived there with my grandfather as a newly-wed.

There is a strangeness in such a stark transition — in going suddenly from the heart of a wealthy, overeducated city to this little piece of farmland that sustained my family for generations.

With good intentions, friends and coworkers added oxygen to real anxieties about work and relationships and “quality of life.”

Would I be losing more than I was gaining?

At some point, those questions stopped mattering. There was only home.

In earnest, I believe that people of all political persuasions who come to D.C. do so with an eye toward the Good. As a class, we will destroy anything, including ourselves, for the capital-G Good of “making a difference.” It’s in that moment of abandoning ourselves for the collective, political values of the tribe that we get it muddled. It’s in the viciousness that results from the loss that D.C. earns its reputation for ego, cynicism, and disdain for human frailty.

In reflecting on my own failures and selfish, stupid unkindnesses, it’s been the incredible tenderness of so many people — bartenders, baristas, police officers, desk clerks, shop managers, taxi drivers, and so many others — that nudged me toward something more human.

Halfway through my political career in D.C., I had an ill-fated stint as a Communications Director in a Congressional office and spent the next 8 months working a minimum wage job in Georgetown. I was wearing my mom’s old sweatshirt and eating ramen noodles after a late night shift when I came across the 1962 episode of Rod Serling’s incomparable series The Twilight Zone, “Person or Persons Unknown.” In it, a man wakes up from a night of hard partying to find that he has been erased entirely from the memory of the people he knows and loves. He is desperate for a little recognition, but he is completely and utterly alone.

Were it not for the unwarranted generosity of the non-political class — the genuine, little goodnesses of a retail job and a weekly paycheck, of cups of coffee on the house, of warm meals made with care and offered free of charge, of genuine, affectionate embraces and encouragement from my family — I too would be forgotten: a person unknown.

In the wake of that realization, it became impossible for me to go about business as usual.

So, here I am: home.

Here, because I count myself among those who could stand to re-learn what it means to be good. Here, because I can no longer live with the possibility of forgetting.