This morning, I felt homesick for someplace I’d never been to before. This morning, I felt I could have walked out of my house, gotten into my car, and just started driving. This morning, I could have driven until the wheels fell off the car. This morning – even though this morning was different in no discernable way from any morning in the past howevermany years – home was so far away from anywhere I felt. This morning, I could feel the memory of someplace. I could hear the ache of something I never lost because it was something I never had to begin with. For just an instant this morning, I had the fleeting feeling of being – not sensing, but actually being – someplace else, with morning sun pouring through kitchen windows and coffee cups being emptied around a table and the sure knowledge that this was going to be a good day. The feeling was gone even before I knew it was there, and being gone, it left me with a deep sense of emptiness, loss and the utter meaninglessness of my life. This morning – for the umpteen-millionth time – I wanted to go home.
The trouble is, there is no place called home that I can go to. There never has been. There’s no family estate, no old house where the grandparents lived, no small town back there that I can return to, no place where everybody remembers me from school. Growing up the way I did, always on the move, we never stayed in one place long enough to put down roots, so no place ever became our place. Now, the grandparents have all shuffled off this mortal coil, their homes have all been sold, the aunts and uncles and cousins have all moved on – or not – to one place or another, and there’s nothing left to go back to. What’s more – and probably worse still – is that having no home to go back to, there’s nobody waiting for me to come back home. When you move every other year – or every year as we sometimes did – you learn not to get too attached to people or places. You get really good at keeping your distance and at saying goodbye. As the years unrolled and the places and the people piled up behind me, I became something of an expert at leaving and letting go. As I grow older, I see all too clearly the legacy of my youth, namely that I got so good at leaving that I have almost nothing and no one left to leave. Now I long for a home that I never had, for the known and the comforting, for familiar earth under my feet, familiar walls around me, familiar voices in my ears, and I can’t seem to find any of them any more.
I suppose this is why “home” is such a strange concept to me. I have known many people during my life who plan their lives and make their decisions based on proximity to that place called home. They go to such and such school, because it’s closer to home. They don’t take that great job, because it would require them to move too far from home. They don’t marry that person over there because that person plans to move to a distant place. And watching these people, I can’t help but think how much they’ve limited themselves, what rigid boundaries they’ve erected about their lives. To pick up and take off to a distant city or state is nothing to me. Notify the landlord, cancel the utilities, pack the bags and away I go. A new job, a new house and a new beginning waiting for me just down the road. This is the gift my parents gave me – the ability to not be tied down to one place.
There’s an old joke where one guy asks another guy where he was born. The second guy answers, “I don’t remember. I was kind of young then.” This joke always comes to mind when people ask me where I’m from. It’s a difficult question to answer. I was born on in transit and grew up in a suitcase. I’m not really from anywhere, because I’m from a lot of places. Twenty-three places, to be exact. Some of these places I’ve liked, and others I haven’t; some I lived at long enough to call home, and others were little more than stopovers on the way to some other place. When you’ve had this many homes, you learn to be adaptable, you learn to make friends quickly, and you learn to carry “home” in your pocket. After all, home isn’t so much a physical place as a state of mind. You unpack your stuff, claim your space, and say, “I’m home.” And you are. “Home is where you hang your hat,” my mom always said. And we went and hung our hats all over the world, from Darmstadt, Germany, to Monterey, California. We got really good at setting up house. The movers would bring our stuff in the morning, and by bedtime the house would look like we had always lived there. Everything would be back in its familiar place, the packing paper would be in the dumpster, the boxes would be flattened out at the curb, and we’d have all taken up our familiar routines. We’d be home, at least until the next time we moved.
My folks were the kind of people who were never happy where they were at, who always wished they were someplace else. The place they were at was never as good as where they had just come from or where they were on their way to. So we were always in a transitional state; we were either settling in from last move or preparing for the next one. Unfortunately, I inherited some of that wanderlust. No matter where I am, after about a year I start getting restless. I find myself staring at the far horizon, wondering what’s beyond it. My car seems to steer of its own accord towards the road out of town. I start looking for excuses to take road trips. I start looking at maps of other places. And then, one morning, I wake up feeling homesick for someplace I’ve never been before, and I know it’s time to go. And at the same time, I know rationally that there really isn’t anywhere to go, that nothing will be any better anyplace else. I know that the “something” that I’m looking for – the ideal called “home” – it isn’t floating around out there just beyond the horizon waiting for me to discover it. I know I’m just running. What I don’t know is whether it’s towards something that I’m running or away.
Let me break it down. I was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1960, but we didn’t stay there long. Before I was six months old, we were living on my grandparents’ farm in Little Valley, New York, while my dad was in Turkey. In 1962, we moved to Darmstadt in West Germany; this was the height of the cold war, and my old man was translating Russian radio messages for NSA. In ’66, my folks told me we were going home, which confused me quite a bit because I thought we were home! I couldn’t remember anything before Germany, so I thought we were where we were supposed to be. Not so. We moved to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of NSA. Between 1966 and 1969, we lived in five – count ‘em, five! – different places on and around Ft. Meade, the reasons for which are still unclear to me. In August of ’69, we went to Fort Ord, in Monterey, California. In May of 1970, my grandmother was diagnosed with liver cancer, so everyone except for my old man went back to the farm in New York to be with her. After she died, we lived in an apartment in Randolph, New York, while my old man did his second tour in Turkey. When he came back in ’72, we moved back to Ft. Meade, MD, but this time we only had one apartment. In 1974, my dad retired from the Air Force, and the entire family moved to Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. This was where my folks had met, and I think they were trying to recapture the old magic be returning to the place it all began. It didn’t work. In ’76, we moved again, this time to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, because some old family friends had come from there.
In 1978, when I graduated from high school, my folks informed me that they were moving to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to be closer to my dad’s family. I was invited not to come along, so I joined the military. I did my basic training in San Antonio, Texas, my advanced training in Denver, Colorado, and – due to a clerical error – I was assigned to a closed office at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi. Nine months later, I was re-assigned to Kelly AFB, in San Antonio, Texas. When I got out of the military in 1982, I went to Baton Rouge, because that was where my parents were, and I didn’t know where else to go. Two years later, I moved to Rexburg, Idaho, to go to school. In 1988, I moved the family to Moscow, Idaho, home of the University of Idaho – so I could get a bachelors degree. Eight years and two degrees later, I left – sans family – to attend PennState University in State College, PA. After a year, I dropped out of the PhD program at PennState and moved to Spokane, WA to be closer to my children. One year later, I moved back to State College, so my third wife could be closer to her children. In 2001, divorced again, unemployed and broke, I moved to Chicago to take a technical writing job with Bell & Howell. Late in 2004, I took another technical writing job in Jamestown, ND. Now, I’m starting to stare at the horizon again, and I know it’ll only be a matter of time before I hit the road again, looking for a place to call home.
But, am I running towards home or away from it? I’ve been looking for a place to call “home” for most of my life, yet I still haven’t found it. This leads me to wonder if I’m really looking for it. Perhaps the emptiness I feel inside – the hunger that drives me on – is something else. Maybe I’m really afraid of finding a place to call home, because if I found it, what then? I define myself in part as a wanderer, a person without a home. If I suddenly find myself at home, what becomes of me? Maybe I pick up and run, using the quest for home as an excuse. But, as the old saying goes, no matter where you go, there you are. And when I get to a new place, I find myself there still carrying that big hole that doesn’t ever seem to get filled. Could I simply let go of the longing? Could I say goodbye to saying goodbye? Leave the leaving behind me? I’ve let go of so much in my life already. Perhaps, the need to leave things behind me is the last thing I’ll leave behind.
The trouble is, there is no place called home that I can go to. There never has been. There’s no family estate, no old house where the grandparents lived, no small town back there that I can return to, no place where everybody remembers me from school. Growing up the way I did, always on the move, we never stayed in one place long enough to put down roots, so no place ever became our place. Now, the grandparents have all shuffled off this mortal coil, their homes have all been sold, the aunts and uncles and cousins have all moved on – or not – to one place or another, and there’s nothing left to go back to. What’s more – and probably worse still – is that having no home to go back to, there’s nobody waiting for me to come back home. When you move every other year – or every year as we sometimes did – you learn not to get too attached to people or places. You get really good at keeping your distance and at saying goodbye. As the years unrolled and the places and the people piled up behind me, I became something of an expert at leaving and letting go. As I grow older, I see all too clearly the legacy of my youth, namely that I got so good at leaving that I have almost nothing and no one left to leave. Now I long for a home that I never had, for the known and the comforting, for familiar earth under my feet, familiar walls around me, familiar voices in my ears, and I can’t seem to find any of them any more.
I suppose this is why “home” is such a strange concept to me. I have known many people during my life who plan their lives and make their decisions based on proximity to that place called home. They go to such and such school, because it’s closer to home. They don’t take that great job, because it would require them to move too far from home. They don’t marry that person over there because that person plans to move to a distant place. And watching these people, I can’t help but think how much they’ve limited themselves, what rigid boundaries they’ve erected about their lives. To pick up and take off to a distant city or state is nothing to me. Notify the landlord, cancel the utilities, pack the bags and away I go. A new job, a new house and a new beginning waiting for me just down the road. This is the gift my parents gave me – the ability to not be tied down to one place.
There’s an old joke where one guy asks another guy where he was born. The second guy answers, “I don’t remember. I was kind of young then.” This joke always comes to mind when people ask me where I’m from. It’s a difficult question to answer. I was born on in transit and grew up in a suitcase. I’m not really from anywhere, because I’m from a lot of places. Twenty-three places, to be exact. Some of these places I’ve liked, and others I haven’t; some I lived at long enough to call home, and others were little more than stopovers on the way to some other place. When you’ve had this many homes, you learn to be adaptable, you learn to make friends quickly, and you learn to carry “home” in your pocket. After all, home isn’t so much a physical place as a state of mind. You unpack your stuff, claim your space, and say, “I’m home.” And you are. “Home is where you hang your hat,” my mom always said. And we went and hung our hats all over the world, from Darmstadt, Germany, to Monterey, California. We got really good at setting up house. The movers would bring our stuff in the morning, and by bedtime the house would look like we had always lived there. Everything would be back in its familiar place, the packing paper would be in the dumpster, the boxes would be flattened out at the curb, and we’d have all taken up our familiar routines. We’d be home, at least until the next time we moved.
My folks were the kind of people who were never happy where they were at, who always wished they were someplace else. The place they were at was never as good as where they had just come from or where they were on their way to. So we were always in a transitional state; we were either settling in from last move or preparing for the next one. Unfortunately, I inherited some of that wanderlust. No matter where I am, after about a year I start getting restless. I find myself staring at the far horizon, wondering what’s beyond it. My car seems to steer of its own accord towards the road out of town. I start looking for excuses to take road trips. I start looking at maps of other places. And then, one morning, I wake up feeling homesick for someplace I’ve never been before, and I know it’s time to go. And at the same time, I know rationally that there really isn’t anywhere to go, that nothing will be any better anyplace else. I know that the “something” that I’m looking for – the ideal called “home” – it isn’t floating around out there just beyond the horizon waiting for me to discover it. I know I’m just running. What I don’t know is whether it’s towards something that I’m running or away.
Let me break it down. I was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1960, but we didn’t stay there long. Before I was six months old, we were living on my grandparents’ farm in Little Valley, New York, while my dad was in Turkey. In 1962, we moved to Darmstadt in West Germany; this was the height of the cold war, and my old man was translating Russian radio messages for NSA. In ’66, my folks told me we were going home, which confused me quite a bit because I thought we were home! I couldn’t remember anything before Germany, so I thought we were where we were supposed to be. Not so. We moved to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of NSA. Between 1966 and 1969, we lived in five – count ‘em, five! – different places on and around Ft. Meade, the reasons for which are still unclear to me. In August of ’69, we went to Fort Ord, in Monterey, California. In May of 1970, my grandmother was diagnosed with liver cancer, so everyone except for my old man went back to the farm in New York to be with her. After she died, we lived in an apartment in Randolph, New York, while my old man did his second tour in Turkey. When he came back in ’72, we moved back to Ft. Meade, MD, but this time we only had one apartment. In 1974, my dad retired from the Air Force, and the entire family moved to Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. This was where my folks had met, and I think they were trying to recapture the old magic be returning to the place it all began. It didn’t work. In ’76, we moved again, this time to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, because some old family friends had come from there.
In 1978, when I graduated from high school, my folks informed me that they were moving to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to be closer to my dad’s family. I was invited not to come along, so I joined the military. I did my basic training in San Antonio, Texas, my advanced training in Denver, Colorado, and – due to a clerical error – I was assigned to a closed office at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi. Nine months later, I was re-assigned to Kelly AFB, in San Antonio, Texas. When I got out of the military in 1982, I went to Baton Rouge, because that was where my parents were, and I didn’t know where else to go. Two years later, I moved to Rexburg, Idaho, to go to school. In 1988, I moved the family to Moscow, Idaho, home of the University of Idaho – so I could get a bachelors degree. Eight years and two degrees later, I left – sans family – to attend PennState University in State College, PA. After a year, I dropped out of the PhD program at PennState and moved to Spokane, WA to be closer to my children. One year later, I moved back to State College, so my third wife could be closer to her children. In 2001, divorced again, unemployed and broke, I moved to Chicago to take a technical writing job with Bell & Howell. Late in 2004, I took another technical writing job in Jamestown, ND. Now, I’m starting to stare at the horizon again, and I know it’ll only be a matter of time before I hit the road again, looking for a place to call home.
But, am I running towards home or away from it? I’ve been looking for a place to call “home” for most of my life, yet I still haven’t found it. This leads me to wonder if I’m really looking for it. Perhaps the emptiness I feel inside – the hunger that drives me on – is something else. Maybe I’m really afraid of finding a place to call home, because if I found it, what then? I define myself in part as a wanderer, a person without a home. If I suddenly find myself at home, what becomes of me? Maybe I pick up and run, using the quest for home as an excuse. But, as the old saying goes, no matter where you go, there you are. And when I get to a new place, I find myself there still carrying that big hole that doesn’t ever seem to get filled. Could I simply let go of the longing? Could I say goodbye to saying goodbye? Leave the leaving behind me? I’ve let go of so much in my life already. Perhaps, the need to leave things behind me is the last thing I’ll leave behind.
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