PRAISE SONG OF THE DAY: Celebrate Me Home
This past Thursday evening, our flight map attached to the TV monitor on the seat in front of me showed that our plane was somewhere over Wyoming, hurtling through the air at 535 mph. I sit on the aisle every time. That means you only glimpse out of the window as the plane banks hard on take-off and landings. Not much to see here. Then, after a few pretzels, Biscoffs, ginger ale, and six hours, we’re there. Simple. Efficient. Mundane.
Now, I have also driven through this part of the world at least a half dozen times, and mostly alone. Driving long distances takes practice and focus, stopping for bio breaks along the way. When you have somewhere to be, it can be a lonely endeavor. Not much to do but listen to the radio, sing at the top of my lungs when sleep begins to set in early in the morning or late at night, after starting another leg of the journey towards the finish line. This form of getting there has much to celebrate, but it’s hard to truly see — unless you are a passenger and not the one to worry about getting everyone to their final destination safely.
Traveling by plane or car will forever be the “have to” in a journey involving expediency or singularity, contemplation, and reflection. But, the journey I will probably never take again — but miss in many ways — involves the communal connection of the road while slowly seeing the world with others. Traversing the country by bus means sharing time with people you don’t know. Often, you are hanging with families on a quest to return home or going to a new home on this leg of their journey. People still travel by bus, but for the last thirty years, I have not been one of them.
Before I went to college and for ten years afterward, taking a trip by Trailways or Greyhound was my chosen adventure. Planes crashed with a degree of regularity, or so it seemed to my mother, that was out of the ordinary. That fear was transferred to me without reason. Bus travel seemed safer and more reliable. That seems rather ridiculous in retrospect, but we know that logic can defy facts.
I remember navigating bus waiting rooms bleary-eyed during stops in small towns on the East Coast and throughout the US West. But, in the Southwestern part of the United States, the most memorable visit was to Albuquerque. The Navajo men and women selling jewelry and intricate beaded drums and moccasins fascinated me. It was the same way when we stopped when I was six by train to and from Los Angeles with my family on the Super Chief. People staring, pointing, gawking, and sampling wares that they could have one more thing to tell folks about once they made it home.
Traveling by bus and seeing the world from the waiting rooms in Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago, Albuquerque, Laramie, New Haven, Port, and Authority resonated America to me. People jammed together, but not really knowing each other, and only interacting when we had to do so. But everyone carefully observing each other: that young soldier home from leave; the family of six who checked and re-checked their packages stuffed in the wired bins above; and the couple with their newborn baby off on their first journey together. Occasionally, someone chatted you up. Or, they tried to get your goat by saying something provocative. We all were wrapped in a garment of mutuality, destined to head to places that might receive us as we are, even though, deep down, we knew better.
Kenny Loggins’ “Celebrate Me Home” is one of my favorite holiday songs because it represented that thought: come as you were. Those endless stretches of white, red, and green barns did celebrate our return, signaling endless miles for all of us, especially during holidays.
This Praise Song is about memory and reminiscing while traveling slowly across the country by bus. For many of us, interstate bus travel told the story of an America we craved we would eventually be–carefully tucked in, without fear of what currently ails us all, while traveling at a pace to see things and to think deeply.
We have so much to call to us during the holiday season, celebrating thoughts of home: the homes that we imagine and the homes we make.
Wherever your travels take you, may you begin anew waiting for people who drove many miles and set up camp in a waiting room to pick you up, loving on you, fishing your luggage out, like you were the prince’s second-oldest daughter or son.
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Like a gratitude practice, Praise Song for the Day will be a way of appreciating what we know we know in a different and perhaps even profoundly deeper way. This column takes its name from a poem of the same title by Elizabeth Alexander called “Praise Song for the Day,” delivered twelve years ago at the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. Clap back if you dig the piece.
