Going home?

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Last weekend I went to California to visit my parents. I told my friends and coworkers in New York that I was going “home.” Later, when it was time to return to New York, I again announced that it was time to go “home.” This is the perfect allegory for a dilemma many of us twentysomethings face. Where exactly is home? Is it the place you grew up and subsequently left behind with childhood? Does it cease to exist except in our memories? Or is it the place we currently inhabit, makeshift and transitory as it may be? It’s also possible that “home” is somewhere out there in the future, when we finally decide to stick somewhere and buy expensive furniture. Maybe it’s all of these.

Upon returning to New York–going from seventy degrees to snow!–I sent an IM to a colleague that I was feeling homesick. He asked if it was for people, places or the sun and it was hard to say. Then he told me what he remembered from his first few years in New York. Here it is, as written in Instant Messenger, like an ee cummings poem:

I remember going around saying to myself
newyorkisterrificsoexciting
justwhereIneedtobenewyorknewyork
Then I would flip and say screw this dump

I told him this is what I miss: having a cup of coffee with my granny in the morning; riding in my dad’s shiny red Cobra; getting a manicure with my mom; picking oranges from the tree in my parents garden and gobbling them down after a bike ride through the hills of the Peninsula. Perhaps most of all I missed clean air, open space and being able to walk down the sidewalk without having to dodge people, garbage and dog poop (despite its virtues, even the UWS can be a minefield). I rarely complain about NYC living–what purpose does it serve? The city has treasures all its own. But it’s always a bit of an adjustment coming back.

My colleague explained it like this:

what happens is, you are you
wherever you roam
but…
some places you get more You infused into you. like a refueling of self.
and some place you actually leak a bit of You out.

Melancholy as it is, this uncertainty about where to call home is also full of possibility. I’ve been flipping through Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and in her essay called “Composting” she writes of the importance of perspective:

“It takes a while for our experience to sift through our consciousness. It is hard to write about a city we just moved to; it’s not yet in our body. We don’t know our new home, even if we can drive to the drugstore without getting lost. We have not lived through three winters there or seen the ducks leave in fall and return to the lakes in spring. Hemingway wrote about Michigan while sitting in a cafe in Paris. ‘Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.’”

This makes sense to me. Living in New York I’m not sure I know it well enough to write about it, or more importantly to write what it has meant to me. But I can write about the other places I have called home. I can write about California, and about Seattle, and especially about Montana, a place which, perhaps because it is so very different from this one, resurfaces now with utmost clarity.

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