Hometown
It suddenly occurred to me this morning that if a disaster of some kind were to destroy Bronxville, the Westchester suburb in which I grew up, I'd feel not a shred of extra regret beyond what such an event would trigger elsewhere. I'd be more interested, perhaps, but I wouldn't take it personally at all.
That's partly because Bronxville is so far in my past. I left it for school in 1963, when I was fifteen, thereafter coming home only for vacations. When I got out of college, "home" was in Tanglewood, a subdivision on the West Side of Houston. In 1977, I left Houston for good, and met Kathleen; ever since, memories life prior to '77 have paled, having no connection to the central fact of my daily life, my dear wife.
But Bronxville probably wouldn't feel like home even if I were younger. About ten years ago, Kathleen and I had dinner at the Field Club with several of her partners and their wives. Everyone was perfectly nice, but it was clear that they were up to their eyeballs in active sports, their own or their kids'. Given the venue, this was no surprise, but the talk was extremely wearying for Kathleen and me, and I made a note not to come back soon. (We haven't, in fact, been asked - not that I know of.) I remembered what an intellectual wasteland the place had been, and how lucky I'd been to go to Blair Academy, where the thinking was, for the first time in my life, generally rigorous. I wished I'd started sooner.
In the end, I grew up missing, along with any interest in sports, any sense of home. This isn't to say that I didn't long for a home; I know that I taught myself how to cook just so that, wherever I lived, there would be a simulacrum of home. There would the fragrant warmth that was part of my idea of what home must be like. Lacking a nuclear family, I would fill my house with guests. I wasted years in attempts to create this home, and I'm afraid that I only abandoned them definitively two or three years ago. You can play house all you like, but somebody else has to create your home.
Which I have discovered, not by the negative implication of my life until 2000, but positively, right here, at this Web log. This is where, surprise-surprise, I not only live but feel the smell of home. Although I write what you read here, I did not create the Internet. Mina and Ben Trot, although much younger than I am, are my distant but endowing aunt and uncle.
Watch for a budding interest in Major League Baseball? Let's not ask for the stars when we have the moon.
Comments
I know what you mean. When I visit my old school friends in the suburbs of Westchester and Connecticut, I feel like I have time-travelled back to the 1950's and 60's; the fashions have changed, the houses are a bit larger, but the mentality has changed not a whit. I even think it has degraded; when I was a child, parents were alot more laissez-faire about their children's activities. Now, you would think the parents are competing for a spot on the next Olympic team for their children, often to the utter embarrassment of their offspring.
As to home, I suppose I will never be fully "at home" until I have a garden again; but as long as I have the select cast of characters I need in my life, be they near or far away, I will be as "at home" as any person can ever expect to be once having left childhood.
Posted by: LXIV | October 26, 2006 01:25 PM
Oh, and thank you "Jerry" for the last line; haven't seen that gem in ages and I am overdue.
Posted by: LXIV | October 26, 2006 01:30 PM
I have no sense of belonging anywhere either. Though I lived in London for the first thirteen years of my life, my parents moved house roughly every three to four years, as they traced their upwardly mobile path towards true middle-class status. The summer after my thirteenth birthday they left London, but their move coincided with my going to boarding school. By the time they moved back to London - to the house they still occupy - I was at university.
I still love to visit them, of course. But I have no love for London. I am, to all intents and purposes, rootless. Which is possibly why I am quite happy to be a sort of occidental nomad, wandering from country to country, city to city. I generally settle in quickly to a new environment, and rarely miss where I have come from. And now, just as, for the first time in my life, the city in which I am living has begun to feel something like home, I have chosen to leave it.
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October 26, 2006 03:44 PM
RJ, this is a lovely post. I do so enjoy your more personal thoughts. I especially enjoyed the 'aunt and uncle' bit.
My blog for me is a small part of my vision of home. The home that I grew up in, in Burlington, Ontario, was a mix of bad and good. The house wasn't anything special, but my parents were both gifted gardeners, and over time created a heaven of life and beauty (shame they couldn't do the same magic on their marriage!). Burlington is still in so many ways as it was when I left it at the age of 21 – conservative, white-bread, full of lots of social-climbers. But there are many beautiful aspects to that city, too. The downtown core is a vision of historical joy, and one of my favourite bookstores, A Different Drummer, is a must visit. I just can't take more of a week living there these days (my mom and my brother and his family are still there).
I lost that home once my parents split up; a horrid, ugly, messy divorce that left everyone trying to pick up the pieces for many years. After the house was sold, I felt rudderless for a very long time. Though home was often unstable and full of discord, it was still home. With our new house in Toronto, I have finally found what I have been searching for, for years. I am rooted in a way that I haven't experienced since I was a small child. Though in the back of my mind, a little voice will on occasion whisper that it could all disappear in a heartbeat. And if it did, I would once again, search for that elusive feeling called home, as you have.
Posted by: patricia | October 26, 2006 04:50 PM