Volume 4, Issue 95: Pittsburgh

"I'm a kid that never grows."

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The movie Junebug, which came out in 2005 and is one of those movies that feels beamed directly to my soul, tells the story of a hip Chicago married couple named Madeleine and George, played by Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola, who, after a whirlwind romance, make a trip to George’s hometown of McLeansville, North Carolina. They are not visiting for the holidays—Madeleine is an art dealer who is pursuing a local artist who happens to live near that area of North Carolina—and that is an important distinction: This isn’t a planned visit where George introduces Madeleine to his loved ones. It’s clear that George has reinvented himself in Chicago—he has not been home for years—and that the George that Madeleine has known (for a very short time) is an entirely different person than he was growing up in North Carolina. He’s not a worse person, or a better person. He’s just a very different one.

The cool, edgy, charming, mysterious urbanite she knows from Chicago reverts back to being the beloved and extremely earnest local-kid-made-good when they enter McLeansville; the whole town seems to rally to meet him at the city limits. We meet his parents, who are sweet and lovely and sad and in many ways haven’t really recovered since he left, his angry younger brother Johnny (Ben McKenzie, the guy from “The O.C,” who is great in this) and, most memorably, Johnny’s extremely pregnant wife Ashley, played by Amy Adams in a performance that instantly made it clear that she was about to become a very big movie star. (She was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for the film.)

They are proud of George, and miss him, but they can’t help but feel emptier and even a little hurt by his absence; it’s as if they took his leaving as an implicit indictment of their town, their family and their lives. His return unmoors everyone, not least of which Madeleine, who learns more about her new husband than she could have imagined and leads her to question so much about her life, her values and the decisions she has made that brought her to this point in her life. She doesn’t learn terrible things about George; he is a good man who loves his family and understands, and accepts, his place in their lives. But this world, so different than the one they occupied and that they thought they understood, thrusts upon both of them a history and a complicated context that, it’s clear, neither one of them was quite ready for. And yet … everyone here is so lovely, and so nice. What does it mean that she feels so displaced here? What does that say about her?

The movie gets so many things right, and it’s one of the best portrayals of small-town life that I’ve ever seen. (Roger Ebert, dead-on as always, called it “a movie that understands, profoundly and with love and sadness, the world of small towns … [it] understands how people everywhere have good intentions, and how life can assign them roles where they can't realize them.”) I was 29 years old when it came out, gone from my hometown of Mattoon for 11 years at that point (and living in New York City for five), and it was uncanny, even unnerving, how well it captured the disorienting sensation of returning back to your hometown after building an entirely new life, and and in many ways an entirely new personality, in a place that’s so far away that it seems to be on another planet entirely. It’s a movie that understands that we construct and orient ourselves around the people who surround us, and how we can be different people, in different places, and still be honest and true to ourselves—how both that you and this you can be the same person. How it can be turned on and off like a light.

There is a moment at the end of the film that I think about every holiday, every time I see my family, or old friends, or really any group of people who I will be forever tied to and will forever care about but do not actually occupy the ins-and-outs of my daily life. You should watch the film, so I’m wary of spoilers, but, that said, the movie is nearly 20 years old and it’s not like this is some twisty thriller with massive plot points I’m going to ruin. If you have not seen it, you will not enjoy it less knowing what I’m about to tell you. (Nevertheless: Proceed with caution.)

After all the events of the film, after all the emotional upheaval that happens, after so much that everyone goes through, George and Madeleine get in the car to drive home. George, whom we have learned loves his hometown and his family and feels an eternal obligation and affection toward them, looks out at the road in front of them. He leans over to Madeleine, who has forever been changed by their time in North Carolina, and sighs.

“I’m so glad we’re out of there,” he says. She rubs his neck lovingly. The people they were in McLeansville can be put back into storage. They may now return to being their Chicago selves again. That’s all behind them now. Until the next time.

Many of you, most of you, I bet, have just spent Thanksgiving with your extended family, or will do so over the upcoming holiday season. Maybe you traveled. Maybe people came to you. But this is the time of year when we see those who have been a part of our lives forever but aren’t urgently so right now. I’m fortunate enough to have my parents living near me, but that wasn’t the case for many years, and because they no longer live in Illinois, I hardly ever make it back to Mattoon, my beleaguered, beloved hometown, anymore. (My younger son Wynn, who is nine, has no memory of being there at all.) This means I rarely see any of my extended family; my dad has seven brothers and sisters, and my mom has two brothers still alive, and they all live in Mattoon or within a 20-minute drive from it. They are a part of me, and always will be, but they are not particularly relevant to my life now, just like I’m not particularly relevant to theirs. They are memories from my past; I am memories from theirs.

But that changes when I see them. And so do I. A few weeks ago, my Uncle Larry and Uncle Terry came to pick up my dad and take him to a car show in Panama City with them, which, honestly, is exactly what retired boomers should be doing with their time. (Keeps them off Facebook, anyway.) They had not seen my kids in many years, so I brought the boys out to say hi, but William and Wynn were of course immediately bored, so we shuffled them into the TV room to watch old “Simpsons” episodes while we all sat in the kitchen, drank a few beers and caught up.

I was—instantly—a different person than I am in my daily life. Larry worked for an asphalt company, Terry was a plumber and they both look up to my electrician father: These are men who had real jobs, doing real work, without a single college credit between the three of them. I am proud of my career, dedicated to my craft, someone who, sometimes to a fault, centers my life around what I’m fortunate enough to do for a living. But you wouldn’t have known that that evening. Before I even realized it, I was sloughing off my whole life’s work, mocking myself for being a “glorified typist” and making fun of my “soft womanly hands.” My old Mattoon accent returned, dropping my “g”s and putting an “er” in the middle of words like “wash.” I drank cheap domestic beer with them like I did that all the time, though any other evening, with any other company, I’d be drinking a glass of wine, or a good bourbon. I shifted into the person I was when I was back home around them, years ago, shedding my current self like a light jacket.

I was not the only person doing a variation of this; after all, my father has known them a lot longer than I have. At one point, Larry was petting Alice, my father’s dog—there is nothing older men love more than talking about each other’s dogs. Alice was getting comfortable, getting scratched in just the right place behind her ear, and I noticed my dad quietly get up, walk to the other side of the room and, very subtly, snap his fingers. Alice leapt up and ran to him immediately, allowing Dad to assert some sort of brotherly rival superiority that surely has decades of history behind it that I couldn’t possibly fully understand. I’ve never seen Dad do anything like that before. But I don’t usually see him with his brothers either.

Then Larry and Terry left to go back to Mattoon, and we were back to the people we usually are. It was wonderful to see them. But it was a relief to return to normal too. Until our circumstances and environments change—then our normals shift again. And on and on and on. Next month, I will get to make my annual visit to see an old dear friend who has no connection with my life in Georgia; we will talk about the old times, and talk about the world, and our lives and our fears and our hopes and all the things we have always talked about, and we will do it in the way that only the two of understand—a place of comfort, and ease, and familiarity, and love. Then she will go back to her life, and I will go back to mine, and we’ll do it again next year. This distance, I’m discovering as I get older, does not make our relationship less important, or less urgent. It makes it the opposite of that.

I had a different dynamic, and played a different role within that dynamic, as the son and brother among the Leitches during a family trip in London than I do as the father and husband in my immediate family now. Heck, I’m different around my parents when my sister is around than I am when she’s not; I have no doubt she is the exact same way. These are different identities, and different functions, and different reference points, and essentially different people, in each of these different circumstances and contexts. This used to make me feel displaced, as if the person I am here and the person I am there are supposed to be congruous, even identical. But I realize now that they’re all just different parts of me, smaller parts of the greater whole. I was this person with this part of the family over Thanksgiving, and this person with this part of the family over Christmas, and this person with my old friends I visit with from the various points of my life from all over the country. Wearing a different jacket in each place isn’t dishonest; it’s maybe the most honest thing any of us can do. To meet a person where they sit, to become what you once were and in small ways still are just because they are there, is to be to true to them—and to yourself. On Monday, I will be back to my regular life. I will still carry all these people, inside. I hope they carry me as well.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Best Active Players Without an MVP Award, MLB.com. Nice light week, it was Thanksgiving, I hope that’s OK.

2. One Thing For Every Team to Be Thankful For, MLB.com. Not above writing this chestnut every year.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “May December,” “Rustin” and the truly terrible “Next Goal Wins.”

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the Tennessee game and previewed the Georgia Tech game.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity,” Brian Klaas, The Garden of Forking Paths. I know people don’t want to talk about this yet, and I of course totally understand that, but I’m really not sure those not paying attention really quite comprehend how terrifyingly off-the-rails Trump has become in the last few months. Here’s a select example:

On Friday night, Donald Trump gave a chillingly dark speech which few Americans know about.

He pledged to get tough on crime by executing people for petty crimes like shoplifting.

He joked about Paul Pelosi, the elderly husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was nearly beaten to death by a MAGA conspiracist who bludgeoned Pelosi’s skull with a hammer. (The baying crowd found Trump’s joke hilarious, laughing with glee at the prospect of an innocent elderly man nearly being assassinated).

Then, showing his intellectual acumen and flashing his firm grip on reality, Trump told the California crowd that he had an ingenious plan for fighting forest fires which involved…watering the forests so that the ground would be damp. (This is an additional strategy beyond his plan to “rake the forests,” which he previously suggested; American forests cover 800 million acres of land).

Don’t drown in this yet. But this stuff is pretty important!

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Hangover Game,” MJ Lenderman. He’s got a new live album, and it’s so great, and plus this song is about Michael Jordan being drunk, and you really can’t go wrong with that.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

A good parent lets his kids play with fire.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will