Home at Home

Over at Slice of Life Holmes has a powerful post that begins as a tribute to a fallen police officer in his new city, Charlotte (where I lived from 1994 to 1996) and ends up as a reflection on what it means to be at home. Over the course of the post he comes to an epiphany that he presents through the literary tactic of epistrophe. Charlotte has become his city.

For many of us "home" is a more problematic concept than it ought to be. Holmes and I grew up in the same home town, and for many years "home" was to us a simple concept: A little out of the way mill town where we attended our one high school and lamented how damned boring life there was. Newport was the poor stepchild in the Upper Valley, a town we rather easily referred to as a shithole, though nestled as it is in the hills and trees of New England it is a lovely shithole and when things are good and jobs are plentiful and the many narrow-minded folks are not winning the hearts and minds of the town, we both can even romanticize it if the conversation flows in the right way.

But then you go to college, and by sophomore year you discover that after a week or two at home you are ready to be back on campus. By senior year, you are comfortable saying that you are ready for break to be over so you can be back in your room, back at your house, back to practice and even to classes. You are ready to be back home, or at least "home." To use academic jargon, "home" becomes a problemetized concept during your college years. To strip away that jargon, for many of us, college marks the first time that we realize that our horizons have changed, and that home will no longer be simply where we grew up.

By now I have moved so often, and my Mom no longer lives in the old hometown, and my Dad is only there for a little more than half the year, and the house in which I grew up was lost (conceded?) in a divorce settlement far from my control or say-so, and though I may return once every eighteen months or so I am rarely there for more than a couple of days, so that Newport is my old home town, but it is no longer home and has not been for a long time.

In recent years home has been Charlotte and Washington, Charlottesville and Athens, Grahamstown (South Africa) and Oxford (England). There have been others as well. Home has been Mankato, unhappily, and now it is Odessa, and I am as surprised as anyone that it is happily so. I've no idea how long this flat, dry expanse between Dallas-Fort Worth and El Paso will be home, but it is for now, and while home is, for most people, a long-time thing, in my peripatetic life since leaving the home town it has also often been a right-now thing.

"Home" is surely more than where you lay your head, though laying one's head is probably a necessary condition. Home is, ultimately, where you live your life not only in the grandest sense, but also where you establish a rapport with the mundane. Home for me is a frustrating and expensive heating/cooling unit and the little old ladies next door with whom we exchange small talk when they teeter outdoors to smoke. It is the Odessa American in my carport every morning even if I will rarely read much of it, and it is the growing campus less than a mile from our front door. Home is where I come back to when I have been somewhere else. Home is a place I defend to outsiders before they have even said anything disparaging and it is a place I need to leave every so often even if it won't be long before I'll be referring to "home," and I'll know exactly the place I have in mind when I say it.