Home.

 A really nice perk of living here in IL is that I can drive to Buffalo in just about 8.5 hours.  To some, that might seem like a long drive, but after years and years of making the trek from Austin to Buffalo (24 hours), it seems like nothing.  It is about a boring a drive as you can think of; IL looks like IN looks like OH - prairie grasses, farm houses, speed traps.  PA is just Erie and there's nothing to see there.  When you hit to border of NY, things start to change.  Hills, vineyards, more trees, different trees, green and lush, verdant and bucolic.  It is a visual encouragement that I am almost there, almost home.

It is funny how you can be away from a place for decades and still call it home.  I lived in Texas longer than I lived in Buffalo, but Buffalo is still home.  I feel it when the roads I am driving feel familiar, when I drive past the house I grew up in, or when I bite into pizza that tastes the way pizza should taste.  It is seeing Bills flags flying from porches, knowing any restaurant I eat at will have great food, and hearing that Buffalo accent fill my ears. If Midwest Nice is a thing, Buffalo Brash is also a thing.  People say it, they mean it, it might hurt, but they'll clap you on the back and invite you over at the same time.  It is wild and wonderful and, after so many years away, can be startling before it is soothing.

always soothing

This last trip, all of my siblings and their children and one of mine were there at the same time.  What an absolute joy to see all of them mostly at once and laugh and talk and gather. We love each other and drive each other crazy.  We talk over one another and hurt each other's feelings.  We compete, as we have always competed, to be seen and heard and acknowledged. We remember stories and share new ones.  This gathering was loud and full of food and words.  So many words.  

Words always make me think of home because my mother has always loved words.  Crossword puzzles, Scrabble, reading, using big words because she could; that love of words passed on to each of us.  I think this is why it is so hard now to watch her search for words, common words and names, when she is talking.  To watch my mom who always had something to say, who would do a small dance at the table when she knew she was hitting hard with a triple word score, sigh and close her eyes and try to make the word appear in her head.  Sometimes it does, or sometimes we can find the word for her.  Often times, it doesn't and she sighs.  She is anxious a lot and she is frustrated a lot and I am so, so sad as I watch the way words seem to fail her in a way that they once defined her.  

Words are also failing my dad in that he just cannot hear them.  He used to love to tell a story, tell a joke, share words with others, and laugh.  The kids all laughed about how when Papa sends them a text, it is more like an email with paragraphs.  He still has words, he just can't hear others use them and it can be challenging to have a conversation with him.  It also means that if there is anyone else in the room, you are for sure having at least two separate conversations at once.  This can make even the most avid word-lover at a loss for her own words.

My brother and sisters and I struggle as we recognize the rapidity of our parents' aging.  I think we also struggle with and how we define home now.  Home used to always be my parent's house on Aurora Street. Home was us crowded around their kitchen table laughing and drinking coffee and tripping over words.   That sense of home, once defined by our parents, is now left to us to replicate and warm. We seem to be doing it though. I feel it in my sister's house where she gathers us and feeds us.  I hear it in my other sister's voice when she calls and we share stories.  I relax in it at my brother's house where we can sit and not talk.  I see it in my son and his cousins in how they treat one another after so many years apart.  It is there, it just looks different.

It is hard to see and recognize the shift in what we remember as home. Or the changes in the people who were once such solid forces in our lives. As someone who has lived in many different homes in different states, I know that the feeling of being home takes different forms.  Buffalo is home, Austin is home, being together with my kids is home. Home is being celebrated and called out, home is being our best and our absolute worst and still being welcome, home is an idea held in your heart and shared with others.  And I am ever so lucky because after driving 8.5 hours back, stepping into my person's arms and being held so tight felt just like home too.

Over-Done, Garish, Italianate Splendor and Joy

 A perk of this move to IL is that I can be in Lancaster, NY after just an eight hour(ish) drive.  That might seem long a long day of driving, but it used to take twenty-four hours of driving to get there from Austin, so this eight hours seems like a dream! Five states, eight hours, and approximately $500000000 in tolls.  On my list of things to do?  Get an EZ Pass.

My person and I made a late-minute decision to go to Buffalo for the holidays as our children would be celebrating with their other parents and it is just us here and that seemed sad and there were old people at home who needed to be seen.  Many reasons, all of them good, and off we went.  

Old people who needed to be seen.

My person has never been to Buffalo before so I did the very responsible thing and ordered pizza before we even exited the highway.  Everyone has their favorite local pizza and mine is Grasso's cheese and pepperoni with blue cheese to dip it into.  There is something about the crust, that thick cheese, the way the pepperoni curls up into cups and gives you a grease shooter - YUM!  You just cannot find pizza like this anywhere else.

Pizza in hand, we went to check into our hotel.  Of course family offered us a room, but it can be a lot to meet someone's family on a short trip during the holidays, and I did another responsible thing and got us a hotel.  Not any hotel, but a hotel full of Italianate splendor!  Giant chandeliers greeted us in the lobby and there was an entire hallway of fake facades made to look like a street in Italy.  I sent a video of it to my friend and she correctly remarked that it looked like the Titanic.  You could buy a single red rose for $5 and many of the rooms offered a giant tub right next to the bed.  My person and I loved how crappy and over-the-top this place was.  I would not rate it five stars because during our three nights there, housekeeping never came in.  We had no shampoo and when I asked at the desk, I was given three bottles of body wash.  This left my hair looking like a river otter who escaped an oil spill but by God, we had splendor!

my heart will go on......

We went out for a few drinks that night and my person met my sister, her husband, her sons, and two cousins in rapid succession. The next day he met my parents and an aunt and uncle and then even more people at my sister's house for Christmas Eve.  The next day he met my sister-in-law and my niece. BAM BAM BAM!  New people, my people, and he was what he always is: wonderful,  charming, engaging, and funny.  Swoon. 

This trip was fast and furious and we did the holidays and are already home and had a nap.  I am so happy that we took this trip.  That we had time to sit with my parents and talk.  That an aunt made a special trip to see me.  That my person saw where I grew up and who I grew up with and that he liked all of it.  I find that despite missing my kids this Christmas, I had joy.  What a joy to sit across the table from my nephews who have grown into men and listen to them talk about jobs and women and life in their twenties!  What a joy to spend Christmas Eve at my sister Melissa's and it be so lovely, so inclusive, so filled with people, that I felt I had stepped back in time to the Christmases of my youth! (she makes a killer sauce too. I believe my father commented it was so good it would make an old Italian woman weep.) What a joy to see the joy on my parent's face as I stepped into their house!  What a joy to still be able to step into their house.  And what a joy to do all this with my person!

I hope that you also had joy this holiday season. Joy on Christmas is not always a given, so if you didn't have joy, I hope that you find a picture you took with a stranger in the background that cracks you up and you nod and say "I love Buffalo." Or Austin. Or Raleigh. Or wherever you are currently sitting.  If you don't have a picture that makes you laugh, I hope you had some over-done, garish, Italianate splendor.  And if you didn't have over-done, garish, Italianate splendor, I know place; just bring your own shampoo.

this guy!!

In a Tiny Room

In my parent’s house in Buffalo, there is a bedroom at the top of the stairs.  It’s a tiny room and normal-sized people find it hard to stand up anywhere but in the middle of the room as the ceiling and walls are slanted on both sides.  This room is shaped by the angled roof and the way it was squeezed into being at the front of the house.  I love this tiny room and insist on staying in it every time I visit.  To me, once I step inside that tiny room with its slanted ceilings and window that faces the street, all my adult responsibilities seem to slide off my shoulders and pool in the depth of the carpet. 

In that tiny room, I know that down the street there is the elementary school where I still picture my 5^th grade teacher’s room to know which way north is. Further down the street is the middle school and my sister’s old house. And a little further down and to the right is the Village and the Opera House where I spent a summer as a wench in “Once Upon a Mattress”.  This makes my daughter laugh when I tell her, and emboldened, I share the spot I fell off my bike, or walked when I was angry or kissed a boy after a dance.  The buildings, the road, the town become familiar to her as the stories change them into events, occurrences, and history.

In that tiny room, I relax knowing that I will get to spend a lot of time with my parents. That for this week, they are just outside the door and not 1,500 miles away.  We will drink our shared coffee and talk.  We will eat our meals together. We will live together again for this short time.  We will sit on porches and decks and patios and use up all the words that seem to get twisted in phone lines and not as easy to get out.  They will revel in how big the kids are and make connections with them as young adults.  And the kids will laugh with them and talk to them and open up in ways I don’t ever see coming.  There is a comfort for them as well in Grammie and Papa’s house.

The porch is right under the tiny room and my favorite outdoor spot.

In that tiny room, I will make plans to see friends that I have known forever.  We will get together and talk and laugh and remember and share and whisper and scream and confide and reminisce.  We will be fifteen again for the night.  I will see family: aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters, and someone’s new baby.  They will marvel at my kids and make them feel instantly connected into this amazing behemoth of a family.  My kids and Bill will marvel at all the people we are related to and ask now who is this?  How are we related?  Why is this stranger hugging me?  My daughter will ask if the party we are going to is large and I will say yes as my mother says no at the same time.  For her, it is small, for us it is gigantic.  A gargantuan grouping of people related by blood and past and love. 

In that tiny room, I will lay awake on my last night and wonder how long it will be until I lay under the slanted ceilings again.  I admit that some summers, I want to travel somewhere else.  Someplace exotic or unknown; somewhere I have only seen in pictures and want to see first-hand.  But I know that all of these places inevitably lose out to the internal compass pointing me always to Buffalo.  To family and friends and to that tiny room.  That tiny room with its slanted ceilings and window facing the street, where my heart no longer feels divided between the home of my youth and the home of the last twenty-five years; it just feels whole.

A Heart Full of Love

I should really be studying for the test I have on Monday or prepping for my classes that start in two weeks and yet here I am, staring at a screen and doing neither.  I have spent most of this week trapped in a fugue state of denial that summer is over and a whirlwind of last-minute things I meant to get done the past three months.  I have also spent a great deal of time procrastinating: yes! We absolutely need chocolate cake and fresh whipped cream to top it right now, and yes! That laundry room really needs to be organized before I do one more thing.  Oh and the boy’s closet and if his, why not SG’s as well.  This has been a completely bipolar week of frenzied activity and listless, lethargic TV watching. This morning I woke up way too early with a heart full of Buffalo that I feel I have to share before I can get down to all the things I really need to do.  Some may say I am procrastinating yet again, I say I am simply sharing a heart full of love for a place and people I miss.

I was surprised to feel so physically homesick because I was just in Buffalo two weeks ago.  I’m not sure if I was dreaming about it, but I woke up with an actual emptiness in my heart and words swirling in my brain.  Normally I would attribute it to the omnipresent heat of August, but it was hot in Buffalo this trip too.  No shivering in a sweatshirt while the locals wore their shorts and tanks this time.  Maybe it was because I traveled home alone and got to really spend time connecting with all of my people there without worrying if the people I brought with me were having fun too.  I did a lot of visiting. I visited more in six days than I have in six years.  Visits over coffee, pizza, beer, pastries – always some kind of food.  Visits on decks and patios because even though it was hot, you go outside when the sun shines because you know you have winter months of being cooped up indoors.  Scheduled visits and pop up visits and so much talking.  Yes, I was in my element. 

I was overwhelmed at my aunt’s house first because everyone asked to see my kids and I had to keep saying it was “just me, just me”, then because so many people were calling me “Becki” and after a while I kind of wanted to throw up in my mouth about it, and next because of the sheer volume of people.  Out of the twelve, eleven of the Lazarus siblings were there and with them an assortment of their kids and grandkids, but it no way all of us as this was an unofficial reunion, not an official one.  I was so happy to see aunts and uncles and cousins that I had not seen in a long time and to meet new fiancées and babies and see that they were happy to see me as well and I remembered this is family.  This is a big, crazy, loud, talking family.  Oh the words!  The words were tumbling, spilling, carrying over, non-stop and punctuated with laughter, with unshed tears for the sister and husband who weren’t able to make it and with unrestrained joy.  It was amazing, and slightly overwhelming, to be a part of this.

The next day, my sister took a cousin, her husband and me downtown to see what they have done with the waterfront.  Holy cow Buffalo!!  Well done!  I remember you would just go to the waterfront and there was the road and there was water and it was dirty and gross.  Now there are restaurants and bridges and concerts and SUP yoga.  Good for you yoga posers doing your poses on your paddle boards.  We saluted them as we had our first drink of the day and I was so amazed by the transformation I was seeing that I did not even complain when my mule was not served in a copper mug.  We drove around to see other destinations and as we did I was so proud of this city!  Buffalo had quite a heyday back in the Canal Era and the old, historic buildings are architectural wonders and the renovations happening alongside them are inspiring.  I just felt so proud to be part of this even though I am not part of this but I used to live here so I can still be proud, right?

My last day in Buffalo was a day with just my mom and we talked and talked and talked.  We went to breakfast and I ate chicken souvlaki at 9 in the morning because I could and it was as good as I remembered.  We spent the morning at Niagara Falls, Canadian side of course, and the Falls too, were as good as I remembered.  Actually, they were even more amazing.  They roared and misted and hissed and tumbled and their roar drowned out our words and I found that for once, and for only a short time, I didn’t even need words.

Roar, hiss, tumble.

After I posted a picture of mom and me at the Falls, one of my friends commented on how they never appreciated the Falls when they lived close to them but how amazing they find it now.  So true.  Today I am finding that those words apply to everything Buffalo and not just the natural wonders.  I never appreciated being part of such a large and loud family, but now when holidays are sometimes just the four of us, I sure miss it.  I never appreciated the food I was surrounded with until I find myself gorging on pizza, on pastries, on wings that are never as good as they are here.  Tim Horton’s was not a big thing when I lived in Buffalo, but I have to have it all the time despite it being volcanically hot and leaving me with rancid breath.  Got to have it.  I didn’t appreciate the history of the city I lived near, just deplored its decline.  I think what I didn’t take time to appreciate the most is the people.  I didn’t appreciate how nice it is to have all of that family around and invested in you and your life and expecting the same from you.  I didn’t appreciate the generations of people who lived there so that yes, you did always run into someone you knew or kind of knew in the grocery store.  I didn’t appreciate the friendships I made when I was a kid and took for granted but carried through high school and even a few until today.  I was 19 when I left, so you know I didn’t appreciate my parents. 

I guess my heart full of sad this morning is because I appreciate all of those things so very much right now.  I appreciate that beautiful city; I appreciate the friends, the acquaintances, the fact that the creek in town has a lighthouse, the pizzeria on every corner and those tasty pastry hearts.  Mostly though, I appreciate the people: the diehard Bills fans, the people who hate their neighbor but shovel them out in the winter because they know they should, the people who insist on talking to me at the grocery store or the waitress who speaks so candidly I have to ask my mother if she knows her.  I also really,   especially, appreciate my parents.  My wonderful, loving, giving, do-gooder, slightly flawed and beautiful parents.  Or maybe I am sad because it is hard to spend twenty plus years trying to get to Buffalo for vacation and the want to be there is sometimes superseded by a want to see mountains or a beach or the home of your favorite childhood author.  When the kids were little I wanted to move back to Buffalo so badly.  I know we will never move back and that is okay because I like the life we have here and I like the people I have here.  However, I guess no matter how long I am away; there will just be days when I miss all the things I never took the time to appreciate.  

I am right now appreciating my dad's bad perm

We're Talking Proud

Initially, I thought this blog would be something along the lines of “I Wanna Be Hibernated” and I would talk about how lovely it would be to wake up to four feet of snow and know that you are not going anywhere today.  I would go on about baking and watching the kids play outside and the sense of comfort a warm house brings when you are cold to the bone.  I enjoyed my role here of explaining lake effect snow to wide-eyed Southerners and know I will be called in again in a few months to break down wind chill factor.   However, as I watch all the news footage and Facebook feeds about Buffalo this week all I can really think of is pride.

What?  Pride and Buffalo?  Do those words go together?  Remember all those Super Bowl losses in the 90’s you chime in?  (Stow it Dallas)  Is Buffalo even a part of New York?  (That is what the people in NYC are asking).  Buffalo?  Isn’t that where McKinley was shot?  (It was.) I say yes.  I say you can use pride and Buffalo in the same sentence and I will tell you why.

First, Buffalo is beautiful.  Yes, it has its parts of downtown that are falling down and derelict and boarded up.  Every big city has that.  Have you seen the architecture on the buildings downtown?  Gorgeous.  Amazing.  Unexpected.  Buffalo was the bomb back when canals were a main source of moving things around.  (Read Ken Follett’s  Fall of Giants – a bit trite, I agree, but Buffalo was a destination town for immigrants).  There was money here and they used it to build beautiful, ornate, stone buildings throughout downtown.  Go check out the Historical Society and tell me you aren’t amazed with that building and the thought and planning that went into that.  Buffalo has a riverfront that is improving each year.  They have taken it from something no one wanted to be next to into an area that people drive to on purpose- and pay for parking.  Yes, Buffalo is cold and snowy, but that is only six months out of the year.  The other six is it green, lush and flowering or ablaze in autumnal splendor. 

Beauty aside, what really makes me proud of Buffalo is the people.  Yes, they are loud-mouthed, they are opinionated, and they pronounce every “a” with a hard “a” sound whether they need to or not.   True, they can be a little bitter, a little defeated, some may say pessimistic, but you know what?  They endure.  You think this 7’ of snow is going to keep them down?  Nope.  They are out there shoveling, snow blowing and getting it done.  There is no waiting for the thaw.  You have to dig out so you can check on your neighbor.  You have to dig out so you can get to the one store that is open and bring back groceries not just for your family, but the one beside you.  This will not be the only snowfall the people of Buffalo will see this year.  They will see many and they will do the same thing each time; they just won’t make the national news each time.  They will just put their shoulder into it and endure.

You can do it!!

I am reading all of these stories about how everyone is helping out those who need help.  The people who can help are out there helping, in big and little ways, and the people who need help are letting them.  I never worried about my car breaking down when I lived up there, and I drove a piece of crap car that I put a quart of oil in every two days, because I knew whoever was behind me would help push it to the side of the road and offer me a ride home.  People are pulling strangers out of their stranded cars and taking them into their homes.  People are checking on neighbors that they hate 364 days a year because that is what you do.  Emergency responders probably haven’t been home in days and won’t think about going home until this passes.  They are fueled on Tim Horton’s and knowing what they are doing is needed.  Sure, they miss their families but they know their neighbors are looking out for them until they get home.  Nice that the National Guard has been called in, but they will need to show them how it gets done. 

That is what I am proud of. I am proud of that endurance, that let’s get it done, and the fact that they do the right thing without anyone telling them to do it.  They might complain about it later, but they do it.  They make lemonade out of lemons and make do and do without and think that is how everyone does it.  They love their sports teams and their hometown heroes and they love them unconditionally.  There is a call out for people to come and shovel out the Bills’ stadium so they can play on Sunday.  They are offering $10/hour to come and shovel, but I know that the people who show up would do it for free.  The Bills need their help, they will be there.  Their neighbor needs their help, they will be there.  That is how it works. 

Carry on Buffalo, you can do it.  You can ride this wave of snow and the flood that will come when it all melts.  We are watching, we are cheering you on and we are so proud to call you home.  Haters can slam the Bills and Buffalo all they want, but here’s the truth: the people of Buffalo don’t need rings or trophies or announcements that they are winners – their endurance says it all.