Home and Spectacle – Michigan Quarterly Review
Mount Hood from the head of the Dalles

Home and Spectacle

Jillian Weiss’s essay “Home and Spectacle” appears in the Summer 2019 Issue of MQR.

At two points on my drive to work—when I merge onto I-5 and when I drive the slight hill toward my exit—Mount Hood appears suddenly larger, as though a magnifying glass has been held to the sky. Especially on clear days when the mountain’s white slopes seem sharper, I risk turning my eyes away from highway traffic because seeing the mountain fills me with affection for my newest home. This is how I’ve been attempting to conjure a warm attachment to the United States, an act that was once very difficult.

I moved to Portland, Oregon, two years ago, making it my third significant home. I was born in suburban North Carolina but only vaguely remember my childhood. When I was nine, my parents became Christian missionaries and moved our family of six to London, England, where we lived for a decade. From there, my three siblings and I pasted together an image of America out of movies and our wilting memories, and as the years passed, a gap formed between myself and my homeland that widened with time. Despite this, I returned to America for college and have stayed. I’m now twenty-eight and living with my husband and cat in a fifth-floor studio. We have many flannel shirts and matching down jackets. My husband’s parents bought us a robotic cylinder that plays the radio, so every morning we listen to the news, and I feel proud of how I’ve relearned to care about America and Americans.

I continue listening to the news as I drive to work. On some days, the news informs me of a school shooting, and I drive blind. My brain fixates on the violence like a new romance. I think of my elementary after-school students getting shot. I imagine what I would say to the parents and which child I would least like to see with a bullet inside them. I imagine the dark-colored birthmark on his head as a patch of blood.

On those days, as the sun sets over the school, and the students pick between art, building, and group games, a mischievous few may push the oblong wooden blocks from the block basket and point them at invisible nemeses: pew pew pew. The children’s small faces shyly turn to see if I’ve noticed.

“They aren’t even real guns,” they tell me.

“I know,” I say and add, recalling my brief American childhood, “but there is so much else to pretend”…

Purchase MQR 58:3 or consider a one-year subscription to read more. Jillian Weiss’s essay “Home and Spectacle” appears in the Summer 2019 Issue of MQR.

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