Home Is...?

I recently posted on social media the assertion that “Home is not a place, it’s a time,” adding “That is why you can’t go home again.” The responses, few that there were, suggested more intangible definitions, such as “a feeling,” and “a memory.” Someone said “….a smell, a taste….” It may be complicated, but I detest the romanticism associated with the idea of home. I am a slow nomad.

In the traditional sense, geographically and temporally, my first home was Portland, Oregon, in the nineteen sixties through the mid-1980s. If this evokes your idea of paradise, then good for you. My reality was that of an only child with two parents who frequently fought verbally, and occasional property damage by my father. I also remember seemingly lifeless coniferous forests under overcast skies, and rain. Home was a place where I lived against my will.

Work eventually took me to Cincinnati, Ohio. I remember storms, one of which flooded my apartment. I recall the self-inflicted trauma of being fired, or asked to resign, by multiple employers because I was never properly socialized. Cincinnati was the home where I confronted my tumultuous childhood, and curbed my drinking.

From Cincinnati, I took a job in rural southern Missouri. The employer downsized eight months after I got there. I decided that my being there, however briefly, was less about the work of fabricating exhibits for museums and nature centers, and more about gently suggesting to my coworkers that they use something in addition to religion to craft the fabric of their lives.

On a whim I moved to Tucson, Arizona. I bottomed out financially, and it took five years, in my forties, to establish quality friendships. Ultimately, a temp assignment turned into something permanent, mere blocks from my apartment; and I got my first book-writing opportunity. The office eventually closed, but by then I had met my partner, Heidi.

Moving to Colorado Springs to be with her felt more like home than prior locations. I got the benefit of instant friends from her workplace at the zoo, and found additional friends through other networks.

Heidi retired from the zoo after 26 years, but she probably should have done so sooner. Keeper work takes a toll on the body. Meanwhile, the rising cost of living in the Springs meant we could not afford a home in a better neighborhood. I agreed to her suggestion that we move to Leavenworth, Kansas, her childhood hometown, where her parents still reside.

Four years on, and I still have no friends that I see regularly, aside from the in-laws. I assume everyone here is a Republican cult member unless proven otherwise. I want my old friends back. Leavenworth demographics skew heavily to the White, geriatric end of the spectrum. The town does have young people, but no collective energy. Leavenworth is prisons, the military (Ft. Leavenworth), and churches. At least we have a house we own free and clear, and a couple of yards.

What is the overall theme here, then? Misery? Trauma? Isolation? Mere dissatisfaction? I abhor sentimentality attached to the idea of home. Nostalgia can screw itself. Portland was not a bad place to be at the time I lived there. Today, the traffic is worse than Los Angeles. Before I left for Tucson, a coworker told me that he lived there in the 1980s and loved it. In the early 2000s, I did not. Timing is everything, and the idea of place cannot divorce itself from that. A place does not stay stagnant, locked in some kind of Neverland. It grows up, and is usually the worse for it. Colorado Springs continues to sprawl because the powerful and wealthy insist that the high prairie I love is worthless until somebody can profit by putting in a subdivision or an industrial park.

I think, for me, home has been a series of gratifying, if not occasionally euphoric, punctuations in an otherwise unsatisfying existence. The places I have the fondest memories of were fleeting destinations, experienced over weeks or weekends, with friends of the highest order. I can sometimes put myself mentally back in those places; or on a beach in the Caribbean that I’ve invented in my mind, listening to calypso or jazz fusion, and drifting off to sleep.