right at home

Robin's post raises an interesting question: When does the strange become normal? When does the weird new place become home? Some people ask themselves this question all their lives; some people never ask it, never straying very far from where they were born. I fall into the middle of those two extremes. Places I have lived more than a few months are: Rural Connecticut, New York City (Morningside Heights), Hong Kong, Chapel Hill, N.C., Raleigh N.C., and New York City again(Cobble Hill, Brooklyn). Not a very exhaustive list, actually. When I was little I wanted to go everywhere, to spend a few years living in every place I could think of. This idea seems less attractive to me now.

I know what Robin means about waking up and being confused about where you are. I miss my little stone house terribly. The renovated kitchen that I still hate to think about, for it makes me sad. The peaceful back yard where the dog would roam as I sat on the stone steps warmed by the sun. The first place I lived in that I ever owned, and perhaps the last if NY-area real estate prices don't moderate. It was home in such a profound way. Seven years. I truly expected to grow old and die there, in that house, surrounded by a lifetime of memories. For what would ever be worth leaving it for?

Oh, how life can surprise you.

For the odd thing is, of all the places on the list above, the only place where I ever truly felt at home was New York. And I feel that way again; memory did not deceive me on this score. This is home: cold in winter, stinky in summer, grumpy, difficult, too expensive, full of surly, sidewalk-spitting people and stirring sights and an atmosphere dense with possibilities both bad and good.

You give up so much living here; rationally it makes no sense. Sometimes when the city seems particularly irritating, full of people whose only purpose in life seems to be to enrage me, I fantasize about chucking it all and moving back to Raleigh. Of course, we could not get our house back. We would have to live somewhere else, but I am sure it would be OK. We could be rehired at our former employers, I am confident; we burned no bridges there. It would be warm and pleasant and easy; everyone would understand our explanations of why we came back. "New York was great, but it's just too crazy."

My fantasy fades to black at that point, as it has to. It's just something to think about, to feel better, the way one imagines winning $5 million in the lottery and never worrying about money again. North Carolina in retrospect was like Arcadia: Easy, dreamy, peaceful, no real worries, so I had to make up fake ones, because the human mind cannot exist without worries. An idyll. But like all perfect worlds, exacting a price in tedium.