A Journey Homesick

My dad watches from behind the roped-off security area as I am asked whether my shoes contain metal shanks. I don't know the answer. I remove them and walk through the metal detector again.

"Yes, they do. Huge ones." The strawberry-nosed officer turns the monitor informatively toward me so I can see them.

Gary Lueders waits pink-faced and tearful until I am all the way through, and I turn around to wave. He already looks far away.

Inside, the Minnesotans all around me are smiling at each other and saying "that's ok" after colliding with their rolling luggage. One of them notices my blotchy, tear-stained face and gives me a sympathetic "hi." I turn around to see who she is talking to but it really is me. She's blond and looks like a churchgoer. I say "hi" and go back to looking at fridge magnets.

At gate E6, a soldier is returning home from Iraq. His arrival is announced and the Minnesotan waiting room erupts in an applause warm, sincere, and full of love for this one young curly American. He is given a standing ovation, and people are crying at the return of the youth, who is a stranger to them. I cry harder than anyone.

Drying our eyes, my fellow Midwesterners and I watch the KARE-11 news together while we wait for our departure to Chicago. The staph outbreak is becoming more serious, and actress Deborah Kerr has died. We watch as she famously kisses Burt Lancaster on the beach. Most of us are drinking Caribou coffees. I don't have a tissue so I go to the restroom to blow my nose. I sob at length to the tiled walls and floor, dizzy with homesickness. I'm not even gone yet.

I sleep hard on the plane. It feels like morning when we arrive. The train carries us briskly toward Tokyo. Outside, swarms of small black birds scatter and collect above concrete blocks of architecture. The navy-blue railway worker is completing his checks now. I am thanking him fervently with my eyes but he would never look there; his every gesture, dripping with decorum, seems to further revive my infatuation with his culture. He turns before exiting car #4 of the Ueno-bound locomotive and bows deeply. He would never cry in public.