Reunion

I came to Pocatello--my first trip home in the summer months in five years-- for my twenty-year high school reunion, traveling across the windy and dust-blown Wyoming landscape with Ruth as my trusty navigator and Duncan as our loyal, panting backseat passenger, listening to 80’s tunes as we went. I have anticipated and planned last night for a very long time and although I’ve spent months exercising and eating well, doing my best to look and feel good, nothing could have prepared me for the quiet surprise of the evening. Even though Duncan was home with my mother, far away from Pocatello’s infamous Green T cowboy bar, he was very much with me.

I got out of Pocatello as quickly as I could manage. It is not a bad place, just not the kind of place that offers the sort of opportunities I’d imagined for myself. And although a part of me would love nothing more than to move back home to this quietly growing valley, I probably never will. It’s a safe place, a nice place to raise children, but between the dominant religious sect and political party I can’t really imagine making an entirely satisfying life for myself here, which is sometimes a very painful thing to realize, missing my family and friends as I do, wanting to lean on them when times are difficult, being unable to reach out for their embrace as often as I’d like. I have felt detached from home since that very first Christmas back from college when I realized that life and people move on with or without you, sometimes even in spite of you. The people I grew up with and have known since I was a very young child have become more than a bit of a mystery to me and there have been times when I have felt as though I don’t know my way around, don’t recognize a single face, have never lived here at all.

And then last night I stepped into my past the moment I stepped through the doors of that bar, coming face to face with all those people who I was sure had forgotten me, people I had somehow convinced myself flipped through the pages of the year book and paused on my photo only to think, “Who the hell is that?” It was like a waking dream and each step forward brought me into contact with people I was shocked to see and who were just as shocked to see me. As I moved through the crowd, stopping every few feet to speak with people, to hug old friends, to flirt and reminisce, the strangest, most unexpected thing kept popping up: people seemed to know Duncan just as well as they knew me--people I hadn’t seen or spoken with in ten and twenty years.

“I am so glad you’re here,” they said. “I’ve looked for you for years, and then suddenly I found your blog. I read about you and Duncan all the time! Did you bring him with you? Is he here in Pocatello?” I didn’t know how to react. The first time I was flattered but by the fifth or sixth time I started to feel overwhelmed. Not only did people remember me––had even searched for me, the quiet, shy drama geek––but they knew intimate details about my life, returned to this small, safe place on the internet to learn more and more about me, and had grown to love my very best friend in the whole world in ways I could not have foreseen.

Even though Duncan did not walk with me last night he was somehow still there, connecting me to my past and present in a startling and powerful way. And after it was over (my friends and I actually closed Pocatello’s premier cowboy bar, the place I’d been most terrified to set foot in!), after I’d driven home, overwhelmed and anxious for today’s events, Duncan was waiting for me, joyous and beautiful, sincere and loyal to his core.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world, for having a home to return to, for the people who remember me and enjoy spending time with me, for my incredible family and for the dog who loves me for everything I am and in spite of what I am not. I wish--almost desperately-- there was some way to tell him this, to make him understand how much he is loved, how firmly he has planted me in the world, how many words have been written about him, by myself and others, how greatly he is loved.


Perhaps I will take him for a walk and hope the sunshine and birdsong, the green on the hills and in the grass will whisper these things to him and bring as much joy to his heart as he has brought to mine.