Go to sleep, you weary hobo

Galen gave me a grand total of eleven different CD’s that self identify as “Train and Hobo songs” for my birthday.  I think our obsession with the rough, ragged, happy-go-lucky and totally heartbreaking genre of hobo music began last summer when my sister-in-law Megan introduced me to a song called “Freight Train.”  Until just now, I hadn’t actually heard a recorded version of the song; Megan introduced it to me by playing it on my guitar, singing the lines lazily and almost haphazardly (as Elizabeth Cotten does) between strums as we sat out on a cabin porch in Colorado, between a cliff side and the Columbia River.  She wore a tank top, a visor, and compression tights and had to hold the guitar in such a way that it didn’t squash her very pregnant belly.  I hear the song now and I remember the smell of sunscreen, the sting of that one fire ant, the fine silt dust of the mountains getting in my shoes, the sound of the river on stones, and the feeling that our music belonged in that air.  Don’t get me wrong, I love pilgrim and traveler songs as much as the next wanderlusting soul, but there’s just something about the hobo genre.  The spirit of it is fully free and fully heartrending.  “The whole world is my backyard” and, well, everything else.  The sound of a far off train whistle across the prairie grass.  Exciting and utterly forlorn.

I brought one of these CD’s to California with me this week when I came back for another support raising trip.  I think it’s literally just called “Train Songs about Hobos” by a dynamic duo who call themselves “HoboBill” and “Kristen.”  I don’t think any of the songs are original, but they’ve got a good sound, and sometimes Kristen sounds a little like June Carter, which makes me love her.  Today I’ve found myself listening to “Hobo’s Lullaby” (originally a Woody Guthrie song) on repeat as I drive around town for meetings.  I keep getting stuck on the loving way they sing “you weary hobo.”  It makes me feel like a small child or even an old well-loved pet.  Like I’m curled up on somebody’s lap in front of a fire, feeling a warm hand stroke my hair and forehead.  It’s funny, I wasn’t a physical-touch person at all until college.  I’m not sure if it was getting a boyfriend or just being friends with literally all theater people, but now I crave it.  And when I’m away from Galen, close friends or family members, I so long for it.  What I wouldn’t give for someone I trust to stroke my hair right now, to hum an old song phrasingly between strums, to tell me in some strange but lovely way, “You’re safe now.  Go to sleep, you weary soul.”

I think a lot about physical places and how they change us.  What experiences they give us to carry, and what we lose once we’ve moved on from them.  When I’m in Chicago, I miss the open roads of Oxnard, the strawberry fields, the hills that aren’t blocked from view by red brick buildings.  When I’m in Oxnard, I’m constantly driving around thinking, “That’s not how I remember that,” or “Wait, did I just pass so-and-so??” when so-and-so is a random person that I’ve seen once or twice in Chicago.  That’s the other thing about belonging to multiple places.  The ink of each map bleeds onto the other.  I start to forget who I know from where.  I assume that my parents know my priest, that my Chicago college friends know my California homeschool friends.  My different lives, when I’m not thinking too hard, blur together like the view from a train car window.

Alberto Ríos, a poet I came across around the time I went to Ireland in high school, wrote, “… inside us / There go all the cars we have driven / And seen, there are all the people / We know and have known, there / Are all the places that are / But which used to be as well.  This is where / They went  They did not disappear.  /  We each take a piece / Through the eye and through the ear.  /  It’s loud inside us, in there.”  I think about that a lot these days.  “They did not disappear.”  We carry it all with us, all our stories, our hearts like suitcases, barely able to fit it all.  And it’s so much, so loud, so many things, both heavy and light.  Paperweights and feathers.  We don’t always get a say in what stays in the suitcase and what doesn’t, either.  Sometimes things just stick with us, through no fault of our own.  The homeless man on our Chicago street who stopped me and Galen as we walked to tell Galen “You look so happy.  Take good care of her.” sits in my memory, right alongside the color of the golden California smog at sunset tonight and the way my grandmother always looks at me like it’s the last time she’ll see me.  I think that’s why hobo songs pack such a punch.  They’re suitcases full of conflict, born of too many stories and places to count.  I think anyone who has ever lived in more than one place can identify with that.

I’m caught on the phrase I used a minute ago – “belonging to multiple places.”  Hard as it is to admit, I don’t belong to California anymore.  At least, not only to California.  I’ve barely ever been an adult here.  I turned eighteen, I went to Ireland.  I turned nineteen, I went to Illinois.  I’ve only ever been to two California bars!  I am so dedicated to my identity as a Californian that I often forget all of that.  My identity as a Californian is pretty much interchangeable with my identity as a child.  Nearly everything I’ve faced as an adult – the good things and the bad – have been away from “home.”

Home.  My mom referred to her house as my home yesterday and then corrected herself: “I mean, your old home.  Your home is Chicago now.”  I told her that I use the term interchangeably, so she was right.

The band Gaelic Storm has a song called “I Can’t Find My Way Home” that Galen gave me on a mix CD a long time ago.  He wrapped it in a piece of paper on which he’d drawn a map of the U.S. with two stick figures standing in the middle, scratching their heads and offering a series of question marks to the heavens.  The older I get, the more I start thinking that home isn’t a geographical place.  If it were, we couldn’t use the word to mean multiple things.  I couldn’t belong to Oxnard and Chicago.  My suitcase heart would only carry one set of stories.  I don’t know what Home is instead, then.  Another person, or set of people?  A sense of inner peace that each of us carries inside ourselves?  Maybe for some people, Home is a geographical place – I don’t know.  All I know is that, for me, it’s a series of snapshots taken from moving windows.  A bit of here, a bit of there, sometimes humming gently and clicking (the way train wheels do), and sometimes blaring a loud and lonely whistle, full steam ahead, towards the golden glow of somewhere else’s sunset.