The Pangs of Parting
Farewell to dryer, kitchen, hairdresser...
by Cameryn Moore
I’m not on tour yet for this year, not officially. Yes, I gave up my lease at the beginning of April, and drove out to Toronto and did shows all around those parts, and everything I own is in the Deerinator or in a sad little heap in a friend’s basement, but that’s not quite on tour.
Right now I’m staying with my friend through June 2, which in my life counts as a medium- to long-term living arrangement, and I can still use US currency everywhere I go, and grocery mega-store names are still familiar to me, and I’m within a half-hour’s drive of my director’s apartment and all of my Boston friends. If I really get overwhelmed with nostalgia for my old neighborhood, I can still hop in the car and drive off to sit in the overheated, overcrowded ice cream shop and watch children shove colored bits of chalk up each others’ noses while their mothers sip non-fat lattés and discuss prep school application deadlines. (As long as they’re not discussing it right in my ear, I don’t mind.)
But I’m already experiencing the pangs of parting, not just from snot-covered chalk fights and familiar intersections, but everything that makes up the fabric of home. Because home is not just where you put the remote at night. Here are just a few of the specific things that I miss out on tour.
My hairdresser: I’ve been seeing him for going on five years, all the way back when he was still taking classes at a beauty academy. He was genius then, and he’s genius now; he’s the one who coined the term “lady queer” for my current style. Unfortunately that term is not in common parlance, so once I leave Boston, I’m at the mercy of strangers, none of whom understand “femme-y” or “queer” or “girly up front and hella short in the back”. Three months from now—by the beginning of August—I will be in Calgary and I will be scanning Yelp listings and strangers’ hair out on the street and I will be trembling inside.
My dryer: I know how long a full load takes in my old dryer. What the fuck is with everyone else’s?! (Ditto for microwave, oven, and the light bulb in the bathroom that takes about 30 seconds to warm up to full brightness.)
My kitchen: I’m going to talk about cooking and eating on the road in another column, but for right now suffice it to say that frying pans do not belong there. Oh, and do you have a chef’s knife? You know, a big one? In the drawer? [pulls open drawer] This is a bread knife. Yeah. Oh. This is what you have. [PAUSE] Okay. Right.
My coffee shop: on the road I lean on Charbucks. It’s over-roasted like a motherfucker, but at least I know what to expect. Checking out an unknown coffeehouse is a tedious business, because the checklist is long: non-shitty music, sufficient wall outlets, cushioned seats, free wifi, not overpriced in the baked goods department, cheap or free parking nearby (I’m going to be there for a while, see…). My home coffee house has a great house blend, and while the snotty kids and their snotty mothers can be annoying during particular times of the day, most of the time it’s a great place to unpack the ol’ laptop and drink myself into a coffee frenzy. It’s the one cafe where having a frequent customer card has made sense; all the other coffee cards in my wallet are just ill-judged optimism.
There are a few other cities where I have some functional, non-GPS-based competence in urban navigation...
My skyline: I’ve lived in the same neighborhood of Boston for eight years. I learned to orient myself on the Prudential Building. Now that I’m on the other side of the river, my sense of direction is all fucked up, even though I’m only seven miles away from my old place. There are a few other cities where I have some functional, non-GPS-based competence in urban navigation—Montréal, Portland, San Francisco—but that’s only because I’ve spent a lot of time in them. I need to visit a city 8 to 10 times before I really feel like I can look around at the skyline and know which way is south.
My auto shop: the guy at the front desk is openly amazed that the Deerinator is still ticking, but he doesn’t blink at the art-car exterior or the touring crap that jams the back seat. They don’t try to convince me to do unnecessary repairs and they know my fucking car. Everyplace else, I feel like a small-town hick clutching at my purse, cuz the big-city hucksters are gonna rip me off. I don’t like that feeling; I want to believe in the honesty of humankind. But when that little whiny whirr starts picking up in a strange town, my trust evaporates.
The first year I was away from all this, it felt like I was free-falling in a domestic abyss. None of these things are essential to life, so I felt stupid, childish. But all the little details kept piling up, a misstep here, a jolt of oddness there, a bread aisle that was all the way up in the right corner of the store and didn’t have my brand of bread anyway. Profoundly disorienting, like a little buzz that I couldn’t quite hear, but was ever present,
Unsurprisingly, the more I tour, the better equipped I feel for finding the similarities in my surroundings. And by now I’ve learned to brace myself against the gentle flow of constant change and strangeness. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to, though.
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