Coming up the porch steps with two paper bags full of groceries, it almost felt like America again, the old one that still exists in the timber of this house, the survival fern and dying eyes of an old man living under the overpass on Ivanhoe, in a baby raccoon circling a sabal palm on Edgewater like he lost his momma and was scared and I’m the only one who ever saw him because everyone else is in cars, on cellular phones, flying over the Internet to virtual realities where they bargain hunt or catch up with classmates who are dying or dead in some snowy northern town and I’m here, I am over here Jack in your old room and this ain’t no monument and this ain’t no grave, this right here’s a home and I’m living even after the string of broken hearts I left from coast to coast, even after the wreck, the fine, the fold, I finally made it home just in time to see the grapefruit giving up one last season, but small and hard, not sweet like the years and years we thought we’d die from eating so much grapefruit after those long Indiana winters, the Welcome Station with free orange juice was like something from the bible, like we’d all be looked after and daddy would find work and momma would stop hitting on us because she couldn’t bear it no more and longed for the old country as we barreled along past oak trees weeping Spanish moss hung up like me now in a state of grace, a state of suspension, in the state with the prettiest name and I ain’t got no Dean Moriarty to look on me like a pal, I got to go it alone and revel up my own party without drunks and ladies available for flicking citrus seeds at behind the porch and my belly feels empty, not all plumped up with child then left in a house like this, me hardly more than a girl and those nights my husband was on the road were long and restless and he’d call and we’d fight till he came home with money and gifts and in only six weeks be gone, the bandleader jealous and slave-driving because he’d wanted me too and when you hear the words in the song you know Jack, like you, I was real real gone.