Always Going Home

Of all of the places I have called home, I am most at home in the Dal­las Air­port. That may sound a lit­tle strange, but hear me out. All of my adult life has been punc­tu­ated with trips home. The DFW Air­port has always been the mid­point. Dur­ing the times that I have lived in Okla­homa City, Hous­ton, Louisiana, South Car­olina, and Geor­gia, I have gone home to Roswell, New Mex­ico, Lub­bock, El Paso, and Albuquerque.

At one time or another, all of these places have been home. The Dallas-Fort Worth Air­port is where the dual feel­ings of antic­i­pa­tion and nos­tal­gia come together. It is the one place where I spend a cou­ple of hours in tran­si­tion between “home” and home. It is also where I con­tem­plate my two lives: one that could have been and one that is. It is the place where I won­der what life would have been like had I stayed home in New Mex­ico, mar­ried a local girl, had a tra­di­tional job, and raised a fam­ily. But I opted for the other life — the one I would have won­dered about had I not left home. You can one or the other, but you can­not fully have both.

The Dal­las sky is a lit­tle bit West­ern and a lit­tle bit South­ern. The trees are mid-size between those of the Deep South and the scrubby desert trees of the South­west. The air­port also trig­gers mem­o­ries of var­i­ous stages of my life. My first full-blown anx­i­ety attack was in the DFW Air­port, when I was twenty-eight. It took a cou­ple of decades to get a han­dle on those things. That was a very painful time. It is also the “to and from funer­als” air­port. To bal­ance that, it is also the “to and from novel vaca­tions” air­port — Eng­land, Scot­land, and cities in the Northwest.

For me, DFW is a metaphor for the spir­i­tual jour­ney. We are for­ever going toward and away from our­selves — for­ever going away from and back to God. In each place I have lived, I have left a lit­tle of myself and found a lit­tle bit of undis­cov­ered self with which to con­tinue the jour­ney. Odd as it seems, on this jour­ney, we are always going home — whichever way we are headed. These are but lit­tle jour­neys depict­ing the grand one — “And the soul returns to God who gave it…”