Spent a Sunday driving from the north side of rapid Chicago down to the quiet pace of central Illinois. Listened to music, stopped every once in a while to scribble down ideas in a notebook, and wished my cousin Jake a Happy Graduation.
Ate beef sandwiches hunched over the kitchen table, which is where my family always feels most at home. It's where we celebrate birthdays, mourn deaths, and hunker down during times of crisis or calamity. A bag of Fritos and a couple of beer bottles and the creak of old wooden chairs passed down through families.
Sat for a long while with my cousin Ben in his dark bedroom, cracking jokes and talking of Japan and life and books, and before I knew it the time had slipped away along with the rest of the northern Illinois contingent of my family.
Said my goodbyes to everyone, including a couple of distant middle-aged cousins that I had never met before but could have talked to for hours. They just had that easy familiarity that apparently comes with being of the same ancestry. Scots-German-Pennsylvania Dutch farmers spending the early part of the 21st century trying to hold on to that sense of land and family and tending to something.
Spent the car ride home listening to the same song over and over again, sculpting Caesar's assassination in my head as the sun set on my left. By the time the sky grew black I was back in the suburbs and the stoplights, and you couldn't see a goddamn star in the sky.
