david taus

Reclaiming Identity

music: Strangefolk- 9/1/2002 (Acoustic Set)

“I need to reclaim my identity this weekend,” says Reuben as I swung by his house in Bayside late-night on Wednesday. It was thanksgiving weekend and we were back in Milwaukee. And he was correct: the weekend was all about reclaiming an identity.

The past two or so weeks have been hazy and I have been in varying states of fugue. This is mostly due to my having dental surgery last week-a lovely affair that involved cutting a rectangle of flesh out of the roof of my mouth and sewing it onto my lower gums. I tried to plow through the ordeal and carry on with business-as-usual, but was stymied by pain and complications involving blood blisters. As a result I spent a lot of time convalescing, sucking down applesauce, carrot juice, and avocados almost exclusively. I was underfed and in a good amount of pain and got bent out of shape in a pretty nasty way. The trip home, on a very simple level, was about reintroducing solid food (and good food!) to my diet, and working myself out of invalid status.

Far be it from me to function on one simple level. Digging a little deeper on the flight home I flashed realization of being uprooted and disconnected from my immediate reality in Boston. Many of my people have cleared out this year, I have been spending the majority of my time hunkered down with red pens and lesson plans, I have been doing all I can to avoid the those attributes that draw most people to Boston in the first place. My jaw has been clenched and eyebrows have been furrowed more often than not. I have caught myself anticipating a change on the horizon, waiting for something, but of course there is nothing that will happen unless I make it happen. I landed in Milwaukee very glad to be there, and more than that, very glad to not be in Boston.

I found the place I’m from to be something other than a static entity for the first time since I left. There is a massive push for civic improvement and urban renewal in Milwaukee right now; things I remember being there from my childhood are being ripped out, redone, and fixed up. Even my house is undergoing amazing changes. Mom and Rich are working on an addition to the house that adds a ridiculous amount of space onto it, for the better I think, but it rocks the foundations of what I take to be my home. On a smaller scale the furniture that I remember from growing up is slowly being phased out. It’s just the next step in a series of changes that are transforming home into something more and more foreign. It’s not like I’ve had a room there for years. I never felt more like a visitor at 7630 than this year.

But identity has less to do with the physical plant of Brew City and more to do with the cast of characters that took me by storm this weekend. It happens every thanksgiving break, and I know it will, but I still can’t prepare for it. Seeing the family is a rollercoaster of action and emotion, a tug-of-war of needs, desires, obligations, emotions, and relationships. The extended family is much more simple in many ways, and visiting with family was spectacular this year. It seems to get better as I get older, and seems to be more potent the less I am in Milwaukee.

The nights in Milwaukee hardly end after family dinners, and many of the most honest moments concerning my rediscovering where I’m from happen later into the night at some of the fine midwestern drinking establishments that are strategically placed every block or two. There is an understanding among different social circles that certain places are designated meeting places, and I spent nights bouncing between these places, planning on meeting up with some key members of the inner sanctum but fully expecting to run into more peripheral friends and acquaintances from years past. The camp/high school balancing act was once again carefully staged and executed pretty well. Friends from high school continue to be able to pick up exactly where we left off last time without skipping a beat. And the camp gathering this year was brilliant. More often than not I ended up finding a camp gathering far too young, attended more by my campers than my peers. This year, though, a core group of my peers gathered and celebrated the fact that we somehow have managed to transcend the fact that we all met at camp, and that “camp friends” were now just friends. Through no planning on my own I ended up running into a couple of people that I haven’t seen for about 10 years, and was really glad I did. I was left beaming, proud to know such great people and feeling very lucky for it. My people are good people, no matter how long it has been since we last crossed paths. People have done amazing and not-so-amazing things with themselves, people have changed in some ways, people have moved all over the country and world, but given a couple days to catch up none of that mattered much. My friends and family-these people have a lot to do with my own identity because of the past that we’ve shared. Although that is a hard pill to swallow sometimes I really enjoy getting slapped across the face with it.

I arrived in Boston this afternoon completely exhausted, but feeling better than I have in weeks. And not because I was back in Boston. After a weekend in Milwaukee I felt once again connected to something, even though that something is nebulous and itself evolving. CJ, whose presence in the absence of his family stood testament to the power of all his friends, showed me an internet site this weekend. It’s based on this premise-a dynamic web of identities all connected to one another. A Venn Diagram of incalculable proportions. Taken in sum, the web of people and names and places could represent something like an identity.

One of my tragic flaws is the ability to focus almost exclusively on my immediate present and forget about people and places distant and far-flung, but I was reminded this weekend that who I am has everything to do with where I’m from. Perhaps some of the struggle and disconnection I’ve experienced in Boston has been because I’ve not fully grasped that point.

Back to it tomorrow, and I can’t say I’m excited about it. I can’t say I’m all that excited to be here right now. But as Reuben and I were driving back from the East Side of Milwaukee early this morning, we both agreed that to whatever extent possible identities were reclaimed. And that is reason to give thanks.

I can not have a future ‘till I embrace my past
I promise to pursue the challenge; time is going fast

Posted by davidtaus at November 27, 2005 10:07 PM | TrackBack