Okay, this weekend totally rocked. I was fog-loose and homework-free by six on Thursday morning, which was a nice start to the whole thing. But it was followed up by lots of really cool surprises, like a decent hotel room, a much niftier Atlanta than I had imagined, a very enthusiastic bar singer called Blaze, lots of interesting sessions, a water tower that said "The Fabric of Our Lives" on the side, and of course not getting killed trying to drive through the rainstorm during the very first part of our trip. All very impressive.

But now we are back in Gator Town, which, although I do miss Atlanta, is really just fine with me. I like the one-grad-student-per-bed, additional occupants optional ratio I've got going on here, and there are less one-way streets to avoid getting run over on. Plus, of course, it's Thanksgiving week, which means it's almost time not to quit doing homework but at least to do it more slowly. Besides all of that cool stuff, coming back makes me think about something I always ponder when I return from a trip, which is (get ready to polish your idea of what a nerd I am, folks!) a certain idea of home. I have several "homes," of course - New York, Boynton Beach, Gainesville - but usually home means Boynton, where my family is, and for the most part this doesn't require definition when I'm talking with people. The casual use of the word "home," though, is pretty different and changes fast. When I went on a hiking trip in west Florida, home had gone from Boynton Beach to Gainesville to the car campsite to my truck all by itself in a dusty parking lot to a tent on a bluff over the Apalachicola River. The change was not quite as dramatic in Atlanta - we generally had an actual roof over our heads - but it was still there: from Gainesville to Missy's aunt's house to the hotel we stayed at, and also in a way to the hotels where the conference was held. (The sense that those places were home was really heightened after our little venture into Five Points, after which any place where we weren't going to be offered drugs was looking pretty homey....) Also, when you're a little out of place, it's funny how much anything familiar can be home, too: don't get the wrong idea, Allan, but having lunch with you was part of being home, and Cheryl being there made it even more so, just because she was a vaguely familiar face who had come from Gainesville and is a friend of someone I know reasonably well (that would be you, in case you were wondering.) Seeing Dr. Pace at the Louise Rosenblatt thing was being home. Seeing Dr. Golub was a LITTLE bit of being home, just because I'd at least seen him before.

One other thing I found interesting, and which I will tell Dr. Pace about later today if I can, was that no matter how unfamiliar you are with your physical environment and the millions of people from Illinois it might contain, you can still be at home mentally. I'm not really talking about knowing what cities are like in general and so having an idea of what to do with Atlanta (which, I have to say, some members of our group absolutely do not understand) even though that is another interesting business. I'm talking about the fact that we proteachers generally had a very good idea of what was going on at that conference. Louise Rosenblatt made a joke about the poem or something, and I was able to laugh because I actually understood what she was talking about. That guy Evan mentioned the literacy club and I knew who had said that first. We got into conversations about all kinds of stuff we never would have gotten before, and I'm thinking that kind of demonstrates part of the point of what we're doing. Very, very cool, and in a way I wish all of our classmates could have gotten that reminder firsthand along with those of us who made the trip.

Okay. In the interest of time, I'm not going to sit around contemplating what might pass for a witty conclusion, which is something I've never been terribly good at. Instead, I'm going to eat lunch and get ready to leave, heading back to my version of normal life. To paraphrase the words of Samuel Pepys, "and so to school."