Tomorrow I’m going to get on a plane and fly to my hometown, as I’ve done at the end of every December since I moved away nine years ago. My father will pick me up from the airport, and upon seeing him in the baggage area, I’ll remember once again that when I think of him, I still picture him the way he looked years ago instead of the elderly man he undeniably is now. Despite my best attempts, I’ll run out of things I could possibly think of to talk to him about before my bag even comes down the chute, which can only bode for a very long ride home in a car that will never break the speed limit at any time.

I’ll feel that first blast of freezing air when we walk through the automatic doors into the breezeway leading to the short term parking area, and I’ll remember how silly I was for thinking that the fifty-five degree low I experienced that morning actually qualified as “cold.” I’m flying to a place during a time of the year when fifty-five degrees would officially signal the end of the world.

The first ten minutes of my entrance into the house I grew up in will succeed in being the most overwhelmingly melancholy event that have happened to me all year, and this sort of dark cloud with a blazing sun behind it will hang over my head until I’m halfway through the returning flight. Greeting my mother in the kitchen will be such a carbon copy when I did it last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, that we might as well just skip it. But that would never happen of course. And I’m sure I’ll smell the dinner she’s making as I excuse myself to take my bag upstairs to the bedroom.

The following days will feature many more occurrences that will be so familiar that I might be tempted to believe I’m living through some prerecorded repeat, or fallen into a time warp, except that I’ve gotten to the point now where even that feeling has become such an inherent part of the experience that I just go with it. This sentiment of déjà vu is as much my doing as anything else. Part of me wants nothing to ever change, and therefore I go through the same motions year after year as a kind of celebration that I still can, and perhaps in the hopes that it will mean I’ll be able to it all again the next year. Slight evolution has occurred in the customs over the years. I don’t make the yearly visit to my grandmother’s house anymore since she passed away two years ago, naturally. And a few other relatives have passed on as well. Awful as it sounds, sometimes I have to remind myself that they’re gone and that their house won’t be on the yearly tour that my father and I take when we “go visiting.” I swear though, it’s not that I’ve forgotten them already. It’s just that I can barely comprehend the fact that they no longer exist.

I take my own little tours, alone. One is a marathon walk around the neighborhood near my parent’s house, down the streets and through the backyards that I used to run through when I was a kid because I thought that I had every right to. I remember so many things that I hadn’t thought of for so long that sometimes I have to think really hard about whether they really happened to me at all, or if I saw it all on some TV show or read it in a book. I also make it out to the area closer to downtown where I lived for a year and a half after graduating from college. I packed a multitude of experiences into that short time, and as it was the last place I lived before I moved away, the question of whether I should have left at all always creeps in. Every year it becomes a little easier to answer.

One of the greatest things about going back used to be seeing all the friends I left behind. Every year it gets a little harder to get them all together more than once or twice, and for an ever-shorter length of time. I guess it says something about the changes I’ve gone through as a person that it barely bothers me anymore if I fail to see some of them at all. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine not getting to see my nieces and nephews, now all teenagers. It makes me wonder if it’s because I’ve become more familial over the years, or just if I never stopped being a teenager and therefore want to be around people on my level.

When it’s time to head back to the airport and catch my flight home, I’ll be ready to leave. Taking a break from my life is always great, but at some point I always want to get back to it. At least once during my stay, my father will have asked me when I plan on moving back for good, and of course I’ll once again have to tell him that it’s not a possibility I’m considering in the near future. I’ll try to ignore his unspoken but obvious sadness as he accompanies me into the airport and through the ticket line, then accept his offer to sit in the Au Bon Pain and have a coffee or orange juice before saying our goodbyes and entering the line for the security check. I’ll feel bad for experiencing such relief that I’ll soon be on my way back to where I’ve come to feel most comfortable in the world while my dad is sitting there next to me feeling like the time has gone by much too fast, recognizing that it will probably be another year before I’ll return. These years fly by so fast that a twelve-month span tends to lose its meaning and worth, and yet you just have to wonder how many more of them there will be at all. Everything stays so much the same for so long until one day nothing is ever the same again.

And in two weeks I'll be sitting in the chair that I'm sitting in right now, but with a fresh perspective and a broadened idea of my existence. My normally myopic view of my existance will be widened to include the knowledge that I came from somewhere, and I have a history, and there's a whole world out there that I conveniently ignore for fifty weeks out of the year. This perspective will fade however, day by day, until, by the middle of January, I will have forgotten it all, only to be remembered once again next year.

I was in a restaurant with a big group of people last weekend. It was a late night gathering of actors after the play we appeared in was over, drinking margaritas and eating free chips in the Mexican restaurant that I always seem to end up in for decompression after a performance. Who I end up sitting with on any given night is completely dependent on what play I’m in at the time, and who I’m in the play with, and who came to see the play that night that was induced to join us afterward. We usually end up with anywhere from four to fifteen people. The host at the front desk of the restaurant sneers a little bit every time we walk in the door. We never know exactly how many people we’ll have in our party. When we underestimate, we end up having to switch tables at least once after it’s been set, and when we overestimate, we end up with a lot of unused table space that could have accommodated a much larger, better-tipping party. But every now and then we just happen to guess right, and that’s what happened this weekend.

The cast of the play I’m in right now is a pretty fun and easygoing group of people, so the after-show get-togethers have been mostly enjoyable and amusing, even if they lack in excitement. These days, that’s just fine with me. Last Friday was a pleasant group. We sat in the outside patio in the back of the restaurant at one of my favorite tables because it’s round and in the corner, near a heat lamp. The conversation began as it always does, talking about the show that night, the love-hate relationship we all have with the audience, slyly gauging the true opinion of our show from the one member of our party that saw the play that evening, etc. Drinks were had and free chips were eaten, and the conversation began to progress and fragment into smaller groups, as conversations do. This is a process that I’ve always been fascinated in; the way subjects dovetail into others, and how the people in attendance pick and choose which ones they’re most interested in at any time and add what they can at opportune times. It’s at these times that my true place in the world becomes most evident to myself. I am an observer. I’d rather sit amongst the swirling eddy of thoughts whisping around me, letting the streams of thought take their natural course, not adding or changing a thing, just to see where it all ends up. But sometimes I begin to wonder, is it really because I’m an observer, or is it because I’m dull and unoriginal? Have I learned over time through negative conditioning that my adding input or attempts at cleverness are mostly met with little consideration, and sometimes even annoyance? It’s all so much easier to just let it all go by sometimes, and I’m right back at my dining room table as an eight year old listening to my parents and aunts and uncles jabber away as they play cards.

The conversation turned to raising children and politics, and I withdrew. The table was split with two, sometimes three, concurrent topics simultaneously in progress. For a moment I tried to take them all in and chart their individual development, but I quickly became tired. Though I like to think I care about the state of the country, my knowledge of current events and how things really operate is superficial at best, and hearing the fine details makes my brain hurt. Likewise, the concept of parenting and children in general is one that awes me, but I wasn’t in the mood for a lot of dutiful head nodding and cute smiling during another anecdote of a kind of experience I can hardly imagine having in my own life. I began to stare into space, and when that happens, I know from a lifetime of experience that my sociability for the evening is as good as over.

Something different happened this past Friday, however. I caught the eye of the fellow cast member sitting across from me at the circular table. His name is Chris, and I could tell he had, himself, momentarily washed ashore from the currents of dialogue presently raging around us. And I had the sudden, strange urge to be the founder of some new topic, the less important the better. So, looking at the plate before him (he had actually ordered food, sometimes some of us actually do that), I commented that “you can’t go wrong with rice and beans as a side.” He agreed, and quickly our particular strain of frivolity became a discussion of the strange nature of condiments, how they seem so natural for some foods but should never go near others. Our dialogue about relish really seemed to catch the attention of the politicos and parents, and I have to admit that I was, in some way, a tiny bit offended when they broke off from what their previously oh-so-important discussions to join in on our little chat. But I also felt empowered in some strange way.

So no, I can’t add anything new or enlightening in a discussion about how Bush is screwing up our country. And yes, conversations about raising a child make me feel a little empty and cause me to wonder at what point long ago my life began to deviate from everyone else’s. And the fact that I feel like such an outsider even among folks that I seem to share so much with on the surface is kind of dispiriting. But that one little victory was my reminder that when you bravely stand up and pave your own little road, sometimes other people want to drive on it, even if at first you never really had much hope of it going anywhere special.