Damien Galeone

It’s been a few days in the land of the Cheesesteak and I’m acclimating nicely. By that I mean that I have yet to stab anyone with a pencil. Being home offers its perks – the family time, the food, the increased blood pressure. Then there is the comfort of being at home, which makes me feel about ten-years-old.

I have slipped into my family’s summer routine. There is camp and work and little trips. I do my part to help out and otherwise stay out of the way. My family and I get along great – until we don’t. Fortunately, I have a room of my own. So, when the fam stresses me out, I can go to this room and, hypothetically, lie facedown into a pillow and scream curse words until I fall asleep. This works well and not only because I am usually awakened by my mother calling me into whatever meal is appropriate to that time of day.  

I have slipped into my own routine here. I get up early, write, walk, work out, drink coffee, eat Grape Nuts, sprint to the toilet. In the unbearably hot Langhorne afternoons, I retreat to my cooled room for work and reading. When I have control of the living room TV, it is playing a show in which a bad British person is murdered by other bad British people and some other less bad British people try to figure out who did what and why.

It seems that everyone around here is doing their part to help me feel at home. They are too loud and they invade your privacy. A man broke the sacrosanct bubble of quietude at a bank’s ATM vestibule by shouting complaints into his phone while standing two feet behind me. It made for a disconcerting transaction on my part. In the Czech Republic, that man may seriously have been arrested. A woman at the next table in a diner yesterday overheard our conversation and commented – at length – in a personal way that didn’t relate to what we’d said at all. Despite enough free tables to run a speed dating night, minutes later a man and woman sat directly next to us on the other side and proceeded to have the loudest conversation in the history of the world.

These things stressed me out, proving with surprise that I have a little more of the Czechs in me than I thought possible. But I crunched my toes and prayed for a car to drive through the window. Instead, we paid our check a few minutes later and I was home on my pillow until Mom woke me up for third lunch.

Even the heat, were we to consider it, adds to my nostalgic pleasure. This humidity and heat encompassed every summer day when I was a kid. If it was cool and clammy now, I’d be worried. If I was comfortable, I’d be stressed. I am hot and uncomfortable – as in, there’s literally not one minute of the day when comfort and heat aren’t dueling for my soul. Home.      

I miss my Prague Home; I miss my Burke, but we speak on the phone every day. It’s my cat and my dog that I sorely miss. Yesterday I opened a yogurt and put the yogurt-gooey lid on the ground and clicked my tongue. My dad looked at me though I was insane, but it’s not clear whether it was because of the floor thing or just for eating yogurt. A woman in our neighborhood has a Shih tzu and I keep trying to get him to let me carry him. He does not trust me and he is right. There is a fat cat in our house here and she meows all the time like my cat. I called her to me this morning and she treated me genially, evidently not exuding the undertones of physical violence that my cat squirts at us like faux pheromones at a Joe Rogan festival.

I miss them and I know they miss me. But they are a little stubborn in their forgiveness. When I get back, the cat with butter me up with several drawn-out flybys of my calves before finally sinking her teeth in and scratching me to the bone. The dog will give me the cold shoulder for a few days, literally refusing to look at me until I have fulfilled my penance for leaving her.    

There’s this famous dog, Hachiko, who lived in Tokyo. His owner died and Hachiko waited for him outside his train station for years until he himself died. I have been to the statue and I can tell you that it is tear-jerking. But what is not pictured is the yogurt lid on the floor in front of him.