On Never Finding Home

I moved around a lot during the course of my life; from Syracuse to Mt Carroll, IL., from Chicago to San Francisco and on and on. I’ve touched base for a couple of years with Grand Rapids, MI and Parsippany, NJ. I’ve lived in Syracuse a number of times. The point is that I have moved so much and so often that I’ve lost my sense of “home”. For years I’ve had a longing to “go home” but now I see that it’s not possible. I have no home and I never will. Home is a place with a history and my history is spread out all over the place.

I’ve noticed an interesting thing about the process. People who move a lot envy those who’ve had stable lives. For example, I have a certain envy of a cousin of mine. He went away to school and came back to the Central New York area with a wife. They settled into Skaneatles, bought a nice house not far from the lake, remodeled the hell out of it and have lived there for the last 20 or 30 years. For a long time I thought that meant something. Then I realized that people who choose that direction in life also have a certain level of envy of those people who are always on the move.

I guess the moral of the story is that things are as they are. You live the life you live and you will always take pride in some things and regret other things. Mostly you regret the things you didn't do, when you come right down to it.

You cannot travel two paths at the same time. You do the best you can, and that’s OK. Though it’s not fate particularly – that is, your life is not written anywhere – yet somehow, the fact of the matter is, you have very little choice when confronted by events. Fate without a destiny – I think that’s possible - with "fate" meaning that you are controlled and directed by events while "destiny" implies a fixed end point. I wonder if that’s not the way things really are. We are directed by our past but there is no specific destiny involved. The events in which we must decide our direction are pretty random but our past limits our responses. We are who we are.

I used to think I was a rational human being, making decisions in a deliberative manner. The older I've become the more I came to realize the important decisions in my life have been made on the basis of emotion with reason entering the equation only after the fact ... as a means of rationalizing decisions already made by other means.

In any case, I live in a house that was built some 10 years ago. The interior is painted with someone else’s color scheme, but it’s a good one. I can’t see how to change it in a way that would improve it. I only know that I’m conscious of the fact that someone else created it. I’d hoped to cure that somewhere along the way by building a house from the ground up – designing it – laying out the spaces. To some degree I thought I was going to accomplish that with the remodel of the house on Shiloh Street but that was a plan that went awry. I’m not even sure that would have over come the feeling of not having a place. I think being somewhere for a lifetime is the only cure for knowing home.

Ultimately I will never “come home”. I will never “be home”. I will never “know” home. There is no place for me. I identify with Mark Twain’s phrase “wandering alien”.

So, here I sit in a suburban house that I never imagined would be part of my life. I’ve always riled against homes that are ten feet apart, preferring instead the idea of open spaces and not being able to see my neighbors. It’s a California Style, tract house, similar to all the other houses in this neighborhood – another thing that I’ve found a negative throughout my life – preferring instead the idea of designing a place for myself. The color scheme is someone else’s but it’s a good one; very livable. At least the furnishings are ours.

We will probably never move again – except perhaps one more time – after one or the other of us pass away and this house becomes too much for one left behind. This is it. This is home. This is as "home" as its going to get.