Visit Home: March 2006 by Kevin Walters, reviewed by Thomas White It’s almost been a year since Hurricane Katrina. It took that long for my partner’s grandmother to get back in her house in Erath, LA and for our friends who lost their house in New Orleans to find another one. In that same time, the homeless person we took in a year ago has found a full-time job, love and a home of his own. I’d been thinking about these things while watching the Weather Channel; measuring this year against last year and accounting for the changes in my own character as a result. I hadn’t found resolution in my thoughts until I came across the following work from the Mississippi Review. You can never go home again, right? We all know that and yet we never cease to try. This is the theme explored in Kevin Walters’ Visit Home: March 2006 appearing in the Summer 2006 issue of Mississippi Review edited by James Whorton Jr. This was a special issue of “Partly True Stories” written from a first-person creative non-fiction point of view. As such, it is the perfect platform to explore the mantras of the human experience in writing and this is what happens in Walters’ visit home. He works within one of the unwritten rules that writers follow to avoid receiving a rejection letter and transcends it by getting to the place in which we accept and display our mistakes from the past. How can one go home again when home is no longer there because it has been destroyed by the forces of nature? It seems a simple question on the outset, and Walters writes from this premise. What is Home when the building is physically no longer there? Home is not a physical place so much as the people and experiences we remember and long to identify with by experiencing them again. This is the place to which we cannot return. I was struck by the image of “52 Card Pick-Up” in the opening paragraph. It’s an amazing parallel to what happened in the Gulf and to how people responded to it. It’s also the perfect metaphor of the theme for the story. Pick-Up is a game that only the person holding the cards wants to play. No one else wants to participate. In fact, we refuse whenever possible. Just like the card holder, we may want to go home again, but those we left behind do not want to be there for us. They have moved on and have not waited for us. We can play our cards, but it’s a game left to us alone. How and why do we not wait for the card holder? Walters explores this in the metamorphosis of playing cards into business cards. The narrator tries to force his cards into the hands of players from his past by placing them in doors, etc. The narrator is making an offer that no one is there to receive. The players from his past have left, or they are hiding from him because they don’t want to go back. Why do we reject going home again when presented with the cards from our past? Walters reminds us why in the narrator’s reflection on “the younger, stupider me”. We find embarrassment in remembering our past mistakes. It’s not something we want to relive. The narrator realizes what the people from his past already know; it’s fun to flip the cards in air, but they are better left lying on the floor. In this way, we find joy in remembering the good times without having to examine our shortfall when picking up the cards. The narrator learns the lesson about letting his cards fall away with the appearance of the girl. The description of her lets us know that she is grounded in the present displaying elements of the present popular culture. The narrator doesn’t say it, but the girl’s appearance is a reminder to him of who he felt himself to be in the past. As a result, the narrator comes to the place we all know: Home that’s not home anymore. All content in SmokeLong Quarterly copyright 2003-2010 by its authors.