The Rock is not a very easy place to leave.
For all of my childhood, with a mother who never lived more than 25 miles from the house in which she was born, my family had trouble getting out of the house. My father and I used to sit in the car, buzzing and hissing and swearing with impatience, while my mother went around the house multiple times, checking the stove and generally patting the house.
Now I get it.
I am wrenching myself away from The Rock -- just to take a break.
I've always found it amusing to hear "our beautiful Island," as the welcome sign reads, called The Rock. Sounds like a prison, no? And in truth, maybe feels like that to many who, like my mother 40+ years ago, have a hard time getting away.
But I'm one of the privileged Americans who enjoy mobility; even as gas prices soar. Because in truth, mobility has little to do with the economy and everything to do with a state of mind: the same state of mind--about choice, about possibiliy--that brought me to this beloved island after 16 glorious years in New York City.
So here I am, standing in the driveway at the Opera House, looking up at its towering bulk--and patting it.
Patting the doors. Patting the stage. Patting the studio. Patting concessions. Patting the box office, the stairway, the deck, my desk.
Here I am, walking the dogs down our meadow and along Long Cove, patting it with my eyes: the shimmerescent black-green water, the pointed firs, the clammy mud, the rotting apples, the denuded maples, the kingfishers, the pink granite boulders dropped ashore out of a comic book.
And here I am, finally, the lucky bearer of both an awareness of the power of mobility and a sense of place, approaching the causeway, patting it with my eyes, loving it, willing myself to remember: the fragile green bridge in the near distance, the white teeth lining the slender causeway, the 18-wheelers loaded with multi-ton blocks of granite.
The Rock has always been here and will be here when I return, but it is still difficult not to whisper to it, as the traffic inches up and up, in single file, toward the crest of the bridge: don't go away.
