The topic of home came up over lunch today. My friend said that she has many, many times dreamed of home, her actual physical, recognizable home. To her, "home" seemed to have much deeper significance than the place where your toothpaste or the coffee beans are (as I suggested in my post, "
Rounding third," the other day). She thought it was more a question of the people who live (or lived) there with you, and, going by the recurrence of her dream, it also seemed to be a particular, very special place. I had to agree that "the people" in my home too (my wife and our dog, Wally) are essential—so much so that I didn't even think of defining home in terms of them. They were just part of the indivisible "we" from whose point of view I wrote. Wherever "home" was, it was
our home.
But no particular physical place seems to have the power to
be home for me. I've been amazed over the past few weeks how quickly I've detached myself from our home of twenty-five years, with its rooms and gardens in which I spent literally thousands of hours. I have no sense of longing for that place. (My first few years in North Carolina, I amused myself when asked if I missed California by looking at my watch and saying something like, "About seventeen minutes so far." That is
not a judgment about California, which is a fine and beautiful state, not to mention generally more liberal politically than North Carolina is.)
No, I am "at home" in our apartment. I look forward to returning there this evening. To having dinner there. To walking Wally in the apartment complex after dinner. To sitting down there to watch some episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Season Four, before perhaps reading another few pages of Pinker or a chapter of John Mortimer's first wife Penelope's novel about their marriage. (His second wife was also named Penelope.)
Home in the sense of a particular, continuing place just doesn't seem to make it for me. I suppose this could derive from my childhood experience of moving around a lot as my dad looked for work following World War II. I was born in 1943, when he worked in a naval ship yard in Alameda, California. I attended five schools in the first grade before we settled down and I finished the grade in Liberty School, a country six-year elementary school outside Petaluma, California. Except for almost a year away again during the sixth grade (to a logging camp at four thousand feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where my father dynamited terrain for the construction of roads), I finished my elementary schooling at Liberty School and went into the town of Petaluma for the seventh grade, before we moved again to the town (Tulare, in the San Joaquin Valley) where I attended eighth grade and high school.
Besides, philosophically, I am clear that even "my home on earth" is transient. I was born, and I will die. Home here has been wherever I and my people at the time were, us and our toothbrushes (Wally has one too). Many of those people have died and, contrary to the belief of many of them while they lived and of a number of their survivors, they are
not in some other home now awaiting our arrival.
