Episode 16: Boise (Slight Return)

On the last full day of an impromptu work trip to Boise in mid-June, I finally made it up to the old neighborhood to stare at my past life. For nearly 14 years, turning onto Pomona from Esquire meant I was almost home, back to the den with my people, and making the turn in a car that wasn’t mine to go look at a house we no longer owned was a strange, surreal experience at the end of a week of emotional dissonance.

It took me a few days to get my bearings. And I don’t know if I ever really got there, ever really arrived in Boise entirely before it was time to leave again eight days later. The trip was booked on short notice using a COVID flight voucher from a canceled college reunion weekend. Like everyone else waiting out the pandemic as a family, Erica, Magnolia and I have spent so much time together over the past 15 months, and I had grown so accustomed to life in the spaceship and the inertia of doing nothing and going nowhere, that finding myself suddenly in motion, alone, doing something big and going somewhere far away without my wife and daughter – and on a solo trip to the city where our tight-knit trio had first come to be – was weird, to say the least. The last time I had flown was in October 2019 for a family wedding in upstate New York. The wedding was my third plane trip that year, and of course I had no idea at the time that it would be my last air travel until June 2021. I’m not an anxious flyer, and I don’t dread getting on a plane, but the experience usually falls somewhere between tolerable and terrible depending on the particular circumstances. But riding to the airport, walking through the terminal, feeling the plane lift off ground I had not left in nearly a year-and-a-half, it was all thrilling in a giddy, first-time-flying sort of way, and the minor annoyances that typically accompany a day of flight were obscured by excitement for my first out-of-state trip since we moved to Ohio in the middle of the summer 2020 COVID surge.

Flying to Boise felt like emerging from a cocoon. Eight days prior, the state of Ohio had dropped all health orders, and overnight the new normal of our new life was underway. Out in a world we had barely explored since moving, the masks were off, the temperature guns were holstered, the benches were back in place in front of the Costco hot dog counter. In every direction you looked there were people everywhere, getting used to living their lives again and getting their wiggles out wherever and however they could. I barely had time to adjust to this shift, let alone participate in it, before I started packing my suitcase for Boise. The reports from our former city indicated a similar change in attitude and behavior was taking place 2,000 miles away, but I still didn’t know what to expect when I landed in Boise on a hot and sunny Thursday afternoon. Shortly after arriving, having reconnected with my brother and a work world I had only seen through Zoom since August, I took a short walk through downtown, my head in a daze of post-flight fatigue and sensory overload. Whenever she flies, Erica talks about waiting for her soul to catch up with her, and this walk was my attempt to slow down and allow mine to find its way back to me. As I strolled by old haunts and new storefronts, past the familiar and the foreign, it became clear that it could take me a while to feel right, to feel present. I had touched down in the new, unmasked world in a sense, having sidestepped the transition in my alternate suburban reality, and perhaps I was not quite ready for all of it. At least not before some bourbon, a deep night of sleep and a long morning run. All of which helped by degrees, but did not free me from the disorientation that had overtaken me after stepping off the plane.

It helped to wake up on Friday with something normal to do. The main purpose of the trip, besides cashing in on a flight voucher, was work, and to be there in person for a big weekend event, and as preparations started side-by-side with coworkers at The Record Exchange, I felt myself shaking off the travel, reuniting with my soul and locking into rhythm with my surroundings. It was good to see people and step into city life again. Boise may not be New York, and we’ve been to downtown Cleveland a few times since we moved, but our exposure to day-to-day urban life, even on a mid-market scale, was more or less shelved when we relocated to Hudson, Ohio, population 22,000. And downtown Boise was positively bustling on Friday night when I went to Spacebar to hear a friend DJ. Since moving to Ohio, I had been in an actual bar once – pre-vaccination, social-distance style – and only for a weekday happy-hour cocktail to toast my friend Kyle’s birthday. Sitting at Kepner’s in downtown Hudson that late-March afternoon, pitched between the daylight streaming in from Main Street and the dank emanating from the depths of the bar’s interior, we could count the number of customers on one hand, and all of us had masks dangling from our ears as we sipped drinks under the low din of TV sports. Spacebar three months later in a post-vax city of 200,000 was a different planet: bright lights, booming bass, a throng of bodies breathing in and breathing out the unfiltered Friday night air. I was by myself, alone in a crowded room, and if I had yet to accept the new normal – and at that point I’m not sure I had – this was the time to do it, because I had plans in public nearly every night over the next week with family and friends I had not seen in person in nearly a year. But first I needed an exhale, and I found it there via one-player pinball, feeling like a ghost while the weekend world swirled around me undisturbed. It was right where I needed to be at that moment.

And I was right back there the next night, but in a much different setting – in the DJ booth with my friend John O., our first time spinning since early March of 2020, and Spacebar was filled with friends and familiar faces who had made a point of being there. For as scattered as I felt walking down the Spacebar stairs with my backpack of records, wondering how it would go and who I would see and how I would react to so much stimuli after so many months of relative solitude, I was able to sink into the experience effortlessly, float with the evening as it unfolded, and in fleeting moments it felt like we had never left Boise for Ohio, like the pandemic had never happened, that life had never been put on pause for anyone. It almost felt real. And it was, of course, but it was equally unreal, especially after the friends dispersed and the revelry faded and it was time to go home, except home wasn’t home but a borrowed apartment above a friend’s garage, where my thoughts and a Bluetooth speaker were my only companions and I woke up every morning wondering where the hell I was, half-expecting to be back on Pomona next to Erica in our tiny corner bedroom bordering the driveway. Every day of the trip was a bit of a reset, a bit of reassessment, as I continued to grasp for a feeling of normalcy amid the blurred lines of dream states, waking life and déjà vu. On morning runs in the foothills, as I shook off the spirits from the previous evening and tried to make sense of where I was and where I had been just one year ago, I thought about how often I felt like a tourist while living in Boise, knowing we wouldn’t be there forever, and how, despite all the friends we made and the personal growth we manifested, I never really let myself settle in over those 14 years. And I thought about it all again while walking back through Hyde Park from my brother’s one night, step by step under the Milky Way, past twinkling taverns and trees wrapped in perpetual Christmas lights, past well-heeled lives being lived on brightly colored porches, past wafts of wood smoke that made me think of Hudson and our backyard and my people nestled in their beds in our new home, feeling grateful I had all that waiting on me, grateful for boldness that turns risk into reward, grateful that the thin line between envy and jealousy I walked in Boise was a tightrope I left behind.

Here in our new remote work world, with that first trip back under my belt, I feel a different relationship with Boise emerging, one where we’re no longer residents but not necessarily visitors, in a perpetual state of connecting and disconnecting, floating in and out, and it’s something I may never fully reconcile, especially among the friendships we’ve established as a family, as a couple and as individuals. Sharing space with several of these friends over the eight days, as we conversed, clinked glasses and caught up, there were blink-they’re-gone moments and one-more-drink evenings I didn’t want to end, and at every turn I felt myself grasping for more time, time that wasn’t there to take hold of no matter how firm my grip, and all I could do was bottle it up Jim Croce style and take it back to Ohio with me. Work may be the glue keeping me bound to Boise every day, but by the end of my trip it became clear that the grounding force was people, and squeezing in a quick beer with our old neighbors on my last full day, as they shared stories of the new family living across the street in our house of 14 years and we hatched plans for future visits in Boise and Hudson, I finally found my footing. These streets will never look the same, but from time to time I will continue to walk them, and when it came time to leave Boise, I boarded the plane for home feeling grateful for where I’ve been, where I’m going and the weird space I’m occupying in between.

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