"The Sky Above, the Mud Below"

Babies are being born to scattered step/sisters/-in-law; hugs are sent via voice mail and video chat; I decided to start listening to Tom Russell to feed my melancholy. He’s got the Okie-Cali-Mex thing down and sings to me about things like: “Julie’s got a pint of Old Crow in her purse / She quit the Cuyama Café”; or “Howdy boys, my name is Charlie / Born in the Chickasaw County Jail / My father Albert, he was the sheriff / He shot horse thieves deer and quail / I came west to make a fortune / I ain’t gonna work in your factories”, or even “The mountains here are shaped like a woman lying on a bed / She may be out in California, but I can’t get her out of my head” and (indulge us) “He rode into El Sueco / stole a rooster called Gallo del Cielo / then he crossed Rio Grande with that rooster nestled deep beneath his arms.”

I’ve got a way of being nostalgic about things I’ve never seen nor heard of; I explain them as excess ancestral memories: frozen winters and Route 66 and Revolution. It’s a light form of megalomania, the harmless belief that I-or-some-version-of-me have been everywhere, man.

And this town built on ruins provides a daily thunderstorm — weather for holing-up and home-sicking.

But here is another home. Just load up on memories to later mourn — the overcharging butcher; the furnished, two-bedroom 1985 time capsule; the library where I struggle with Spanish translations of theoretical books from my tentative exam list. Keep going just to have another place to miss, and another place to go back to when it itches: “Farewell to the lights of Madera, I'm leaving with the wind at my back / Tell all of my friends in Dos Palos, I'm gone but I'll be circling back.”