Baghdad of the Heart

Owen left today for his second year of college. Of course, despite much parental encouragement and a healthy dose of maternal nagging, he left all his preparations til the last minute and so his room resembles a Baghdad marketplace after an insurgent bombing--I wouldn't be at all surprised to find a bloody limb or hunks of flesh somewhere amidst the debris.

He's planning to stay in Portland next summer and I figure that's it--he'll never again be at home for more than a week or so. Who can blame him? No sane person with an option elsewhere would stay in south Louisiana for the summer and besides that, Owen doesn't exactly fit into the culture of the Deep South. "You did this to yourself, you know," a friend of mine said. "You raised him this way." Hmm. It's true we raised him to question the parochialism, the endemic racism, the "oh what the hell" attitude toward the environment. But that doesn't mean we raised him to be a foreigner in the land of his birth. He was always that way. He never liked Mardi Gras, which is just plain weird and certainly not our fault. And when he was four, he asked for a sled for Christmas. We pointed out that 1) it never snows in Baton Rouge and 2) there are no hills. He replied, "That's ok. I just want to put it in the corner of the kitchen and look at it." When he was five, he packed mittens in his lunch box every schoolday, "just in case." By middle school, he had immersed himself in indie post-punk culture, completely at odds with Southern country. And in his early teens, he decided to be a vegan, which makes daily life in seafood-crazed Louisiana somewhat problematic.

So no, Owen won't live at "home" again. And yes. In the piles of musty clothes and torn receipts and broken cd cases that litter his abandoned bedroom, you probably won't see any severed limbs or mangled body parts, but without too much searching, you will find the pieces of my shattered heart.