Thoughts of Home

Although it was so many years ago, I vividly recall the day my family deserted our home – my childhood home – or, at least that's the way I saw it. Our family car made its way slowly up Ogden Avenue in White Plains leaving behind so many wonderful years as just so many memories rapidly vanishing in the rear view mirror. My mother refused to look back. She was ready to move on to another stage of her life; but I wasn't. I looked back trying to squeeze out as many of those memories as I could in the few seconds while our house was still visible. Maybe I thought they would be lost forever if I didn't lock them in right then. I always suspected my mother was feeling something more intense that day than she let on, but she never acknowledged that. She told my sister and me to embrace the future with my soon-to-be pursuit of a college education and my sister entering the labor force. I do recall not just a general sense of loss, but a jarring blow to my personal universe that I thought, in those moments, would take many years, if ever, to repair.

These thoughts came back to me recently as we traveled back to both New York and, more recently, Washington, D.C. I was not looking for “home,” but I was wondering if that old, warm feeling of familiarity and comfort could manifest itself again. With Washington, in particular, I knew that it surpassed even White Plains as the personification of “home” in my life. It was here that I had my career spanning more than three decades. It was here that I forged bonds with such a wide variety of people as lifelong friends. It was here that I had the first thirty wonderful years of married life, and it was here that Lily and I raised Jesse and Alex. As would be the case for anyone else who has had the pleasure of such a longstanding home stand, the memories of that period of my life are unspeakably sweet and, I dare say, never to be replicated. When we left the Washington area, there was a poignancy I felt that here, again, was the loss of “home” as I had known it for so long in exchange for an exciting, but alien, environment.

We are now in Charleston getting into the rhythm of a new life, one without children close by, career, or longstanding friends. Closing in on almost three years into this new adventure, there is so much that is now familiar – even instinctive – about this new place. We love our house and certainly the surroundings of sun, sand, and surf. Through a succession of baby steps, we are meeting people, enjoying new relationships and share an optimism about the future and the choices we have made. We refer to where we live as our “home,” but it is not home as White Plains once was or Washington. Not yet. I think that is something that can only feel complete over time, just as it did in those earlier days.

When we were in the process of leaving Washington, I recall Alex's heartfelt lament that with our departure he would not know where his home was anymore. It would not be Charleston even though he had spent four years here in college. It would no longer be Washington despite his extensive social network there because the only home he knew would no longer be his. I explained to him how eerily similar my experience was to his, and that his future would know a home even if he did not know yet where that would be or when. He understood, of course, but it was his head that was agreeing, not his heart.

I sometimes wonder what it's like for those people who live their lives in one place; where their immediate and extended families surround them as well as their friends who they've grown up with. Whatever else might plague their lives, there is no ambiguity about where “home” is. I am not jealous of those folks – I have enjoyed the changes in my life too much to dwell on that – but there is a certain warmth and security that I would think accompanies those life choices.

I have a fantasy that one day I will drive up to White Plains and have Lily, Jesse, and Alex with me. We will drive down Ogden Avenue and pull up to my old home. I will knock on the front door and someone will answer ready to shut the door on what they believe to be yet another unsolicited sales pitch, or perhaps something more threatening to them. But, I will have a few seconds to explain who I am and why I've knocked on their door. They will let us in, resisting their urge to call 911, and I will take in the sweep of what was so long ago my life. It wouldn't matter how much has changed. I would know the rooms; I will recall where the furniture was, and, best of all, I will allow a thousand memories to come washing back over me. I will show my family where my room was, where I would sit in the kitchen learning so much from my Uncle Milt, where I would sit next to my father on the couch as we listened to my mother play the piano after dinner, where I would throw a ball up against the house for hours on end in my own way mimicking my childhood baseball idols.

Maybe some day.