I went back home last weekend.
Home. That place where, famously, if you go there, they have to take you in.
There are still a lot of familiar faces in the area where I spent most of my early life. And a lot of the familiar landmarks remain recognizable. East is still East. West is still West. But the direction home is no longer obvious.
The house where my family once lived together has been sold. The family itself was fractured long before. Friends have moved away. Businesses disappear. Trees age and die. The landscape alters.
I realize this is simply Time working its inexorable magic. Everything is mutable. But the human heart longs for something permanent. Thus our popular music overflows with clichés about home, “where the heart is,” “where my thoughts are straying,” etc., etc. Home, where, as George Carlin once pointed out in his brilliant monologue about the difference between baseball and football, you are safe.
Maybe that’s only in baseball. In real life, home isn’t reliably safe. Bad things can happen at home. Tragedy, heartbreak, cruelty and despair can suck the life out of any home. Yet, much as the longing for adventure and excitement lures us to seek out new places, the magnetic True North of Home grounds us to an emotional core. It’s the primal hug that makes sense of all human experience.
When I went “home” last weekend it was a bit unsettling to drive through the old familiar terrain and feel like a tourist. The actual reunion event was taking place in Delaware, a state in which I’ve never lived, though I have many fond memories of summers at the beaches there. And this event had the feel of another vacation, albeit truncated by the frantic pace of modern life.
Still, once I got there, and was surrounded by family members, some of whom I hadn’t seen in decades, the setting didn’t matter. The connection was immediate and profound. Time slipped a gear as the links of memory connected, the chain of shared experiences burnished to a new luster, bright as the silver on Patty’s necklace, lilting as Leslie’s laughter.
This is what home is to me now. Not a place on Earth, but a place in mind.
The hardest thing about growing old is the realization that it’s all going by so fast, and you really can’t take it with you. But as long as there are family and friends who share your sense of what makes life worth living, it doesn’t matter where you are. As The New Yorker writer Joan Acocella once put it: “Some people guard their home territory. For others, home is something inside them, and they can take it with them.”
That’s my new plan. With my home inside me, I’m home wherever I am.
Ah yes – wherever I go, there I am. I take my sense of Home with me. Of course, there’s the new Home, my place out here. That was really brought home to me (heh-heh-heh) when my brother visited back in January. His Home, now in New Jersey (“of all places”) is upscale, somewhat similar to our grandfather’s home back in Chevy Chase. My Home, here in Washington state, is a hippie-pad out of the sixties. It’s one level, maybe two, above the “eclectic, Salvation Army” mileau we used to love. I still do; it’s filled with quilts and wall art that I made, pictures I’ve owned for decades and a view to the north, to the Lewiston hills, that is priceless.
When my brother walked in, seeing it for the first time (I’ve lived out west for 25 years and in this Home for 17), he looked around, nodded and said, “Nice.” While he was here, he usually sat in our grandfather’s rocking chair.
I noticed that when he returned to his Home, he changed his profile picture on FaceBook to a photo of him sitting in our grandfather’s chair. He took a little bit of Home with him.
Cool that you have your grandfather’s chair. I like furniture with a past.