When I think of home
I think of a place where
there's love overflowing
I wish I was home
I wish I was back there with the things I been knowing ...
— "Home" from the musical The Wiz
So as longtime readers will remember, May is Double Anniversary month for the Talkmistress.
Monday will mark a mind-blowing 39 years that I've worked for this organization. Yep, there are co-workers who have a few years on me. Yep, I have ex-co-workers who have gone on to more lofty positions. But I figure I'm blessed to be able to say I've held a job for this long, period. I'm especially blessed to be able to say I still hold a newspaper job at a time when so many colleagues have been forced out of the business due to the changing landscape of information conveyance. To be paid to do what I love, and to have gotten to do it from age 19 to 58 (er, yes, I'm generously including those first two challenging years here as a then-Arkansas Democrat newsroom clerk) is indeed a privilege.
And as this column went to press, Dre and I were preparing to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary, which was Thursday. Needless to say, it was different from the observance we usually conjure up. We'd made a near-annual ritual of taking Anniversary Week off and spending May 7 out of city or state ... DeGray Lake lodge for our first anniversary, Key West for our eighth, Grand Cayman for our ninth (Key West and Grand Cayman were both cruise ports of call — good luck to me on getting Dre aboard another boat after covid-19), Destin, Fla., for our 11th and New Orleans for our 10th, 13th and 14th anniversaries.
This year was our first Little Rock observance in three years. Thanks to the pandemic and funds that were too limited to have made any doomed travel plans, Anniversary No. 15 would have to be a staycation. And as the restaurants won't open until Monday, this anniversary would have to be celebrated in the same place we've been spending all our time lately, thanks to admonitions, warnings and curfews: Home.
Home. The place everybody is so sick of right now because they've been told to stay there to decrease the chance of becoming infected with coronavirus. The place at which we, too, have been social-distancing and working. The place that hasn't given us cabin fever ... probably because, under normal circumstances, we're doing so much running around this time of year as I cover spring events for our High Profile section.
I thought I might at least suffer traveler's frustration, a chronic side effect of chronic wanderlust. We may not have been able to make it to Paris, Accra, Rome, Dubai, Johannesburg or Sydney, but again, we've traditionally made an attempt to be somewhere other than here. The plan for this year? Dress in some of our glitziest, High-Profile-event-covering duds; set an elegant table on the balcony of our sixth-floor rented condo, weather permitting and enjoy a home-cooked seafood meal.
Another time, I might have been disappointed about being "stuck in Arkansas" on May 7. But just as I've preached appreciating the simple pleasures, I practiced it.
For us over the years, "home," in the physical sense, has been a handful of places ... first a house, then apartments we've regarded with varying degrees of fondness (though we love all our past neighborhoods). Our current rental, though small, has been our favorite so far. A wall of living room windows overlooking the skyline, amenities we've never had before as renters, and a nice collection of neighbors have helped it gain this distinction. And again, we're unused to spending this much time at home. But, just as a church is more than a building, home isn't just a physical dwelling. As Dorothy sang in The Wiz, it's an atmosphere where, ideally, love and affection are overflowing; an atmosphere where familiarity, ideally, breeds intimacy, not contempt. It's a realm whose value we come to appreciate once we realize, contrary to that old saying, that we can go there again. And, true to another saying ... there's no place like home, be it ever so humble.
Maybe on May 7, 2021, we'll be back in some vacation-y locale. But this year, home was a perfect place for a landmark wedding anniversary.
And I've learned
That we must look inside
our hearts
To find a world full of love
Like yours
Like me
Like home
Dorothy, who'd been to Oz but longed for Kansas, had a point.
Click the heels of your ruby red slippers together and repeat after me: There's no correspondence like email:
Style on 05/10/2020