Ever Get Home: About the Title
I've loved this phrase for more than 15 years. It comes from a Patty Griffin song.
“Red lights are flashing on the highway
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home tonight
Everywhere the water’s getting rough
Your best intentions may not be enough
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home tonight”
These are the opening lyrics to “When It Don’t Come Easy” by Patty Griffin. The song was released in 2004 on the album “Impossible Dream.” It’s one of my all-time favorites. And while the title of the song shows up in the chorus, the phrase “ever get home” is what has always stood out to me. Patty Griffin sings the words four different times.
“I don’t know nothing except change will come
Year after year what we do is undone
Time gets moving from a crawl to a run
I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home”
***
I once bought a diamond ring for a woman from Memphis. We met at a Lovedrug concert in Orlando, while she was living there before moving to New York. We both loved Patty’s music, thought I can’t remember who discovered it first. This feels like a lifetime ago. I never proposed and time has healed the whole thing. Today she’s married to someone else and she’s a mother.
I don’t miss her but I miss the richness of that season—the falling in love and feeling safe inside it, getting on airplanes to eliminate the distance. I miss belief to the point of forever, the excitement of a Diamond District purchase. I miss fighting for something. I do not miss the losing of the fight. I don’t miss the awful surgery—letting go, best friend becomes unknown. But we take this risk with love. Grief is the price we sometimes pay. Love left over, not sure where it belongs.
Things fell apart after seven weeks on the road all across America. This was 2007, the early days of TWLOHA. We were out with bands and I was speaking every night. I remember thinking that if we could just make it home, we would be okay. The final show of the tour was in South Carolina. We drove through the night, back to Florida. She broke up with me on Easter morning, standing in her parents’ driveway.
The man I asked before buying the diamond ring, he asked if he could bring my bags inside.
“Jamie won’t be staying,” she said.
***
I’ve spent most of my adult life dreaming of home, home in the form of a shared setting and home in a person even more. I’ve spent so much time either looking back at yesterday or ahead to some tomorrow. It feels good to say I do this less today. (Shout-out to my counselor.) I want to be present. I believe that life is worth living, no matter what, even in the absence of romantic love. My little pup and I against the world, this is enough. Talking to my Mom, laughing with my nephews, sunset with my neighbors, it’s all enough to stay.
But there is still that ache for home, for a partner and a place.
***
“So many things that I’ve had before
They don’t matter to me now
Tonight I cry for the love that I’ve lost
And the love I’ve never found
When the last bird falls
And the last siren sounds
Someone will say what’s been said before
It’s only love that we were looking for”
U2’s “Every Breaking Wave” is another favorite song.
“And every sailor knows that the sea
is a friend made enemy
And every shipwrecked soul knows what it’s like
to live without intimacy
I thought I heard the captain’s voice
But it’s hard to listen while you preach
Like every broken wave on the shore
This is as far as I could reach
If you go
if you go your way and I go mine
Are we so
Are we so helpless against the tide?”
There’s a live recording from Paris, when U2 played there in 2015, three weeks after a series of terrorist attacks. The lives of 90 people were lost during an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theatre. Across the city, 40 more were killed. 300 people were injured.
Bono introduces “Every Breaking Wave” with these words:
“City of Lovers, City of Light, I want to sing this next song for lovers who’ve lost lovers. This is a song, I could never quite figure out what happened to them in the end—I hope they made it.”
“I hope they made it.”
I love this introduction as much as I love the song.
I hope you make it.
I hope I make it.
I hope we make it.
“I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home.”
***
While writing this, I stumbled upon a playlist of my favorite songs from last year. Number one on the list? “A House in Nebraska” by Ethel Cain.
“And you might never come back home, and I may never sleep at night
But God, I just hope you’re doing fine out there, I just pray that you’re alright”
There it is again.
I hope you make it.
I hope I make it.
I hope we make it.
”I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home.”
***
We live in the tension between now and not yet, the present pushing forward. I’ve covered romance but it’s true in other ways as well.
The refugee fleeing violence, chasing safety.
The person unemployed hoping for a chance.
The single diner wishing not to eat alone.
The child in the hospital.
The traveler running for the last flight of the day.
Two fathers in love, asking for the freedom to be true and to exist.
Every person pushed aside, hoping for a seat at the table, for food and water, shelter and a warm bed, kindness and connection, being seen and known.
”It’s only love that we were looking for.”
”I wonder if we’re gonna ever get home.”
If you’re walking through a season of change, please consider joining me this Saturday (4/29, 7pm eastern) for a small-group conversation. You can learn more here.
What does “ever get home” mean to you? Let us know in the comments.
Love this. I am such a behind-the-scenes reader-person and always feel connected when someone shares what’s meaningful to THEM because makes me reflect on what’s meaningful to ME. I was immediately like, “oh, what songs really have impacted me in this way for a long time? That WOULD be fun to write about."
No surprise, but I relate to so much of this - Wanting to find my person and make a home, a home with a family. Ironic of how badly I want to make a home while looking ahead at the next year of my life and there will be two new “homes” that are sure to feel only as a “house” as i continue to look for the people and places that are truly “home.” But as you’ve also said, there is still some time to be surprised.