Column:
Home might be where the heart is
Published Sept. 14, 2007
I talk to my mother on the phone almost every day. It's usually not a big deal: She says hello, I ask her how things are, she tells me what's going on at her work and she asks how my classes are going. Sometimes she berates me over the state of my bank account.
My mom called me the other day, and I answered, anticipating an exchange of pleasantries and hoping she'd be willing to listen to me complain about my roommate and her awful habits, she listens and then gets angrier than I do which is great. There were other plans afoot, though.
After our typical greeting and small talk subsided, she dropped an atomic bomb:
"Your father got the job in Birmingham."
"Oh, cool. When does it start?"
"Mid-October, so he'd probably be moving near the end of September."
The conversation came to a halt and a rather pregnant pause hung in the air like a wet towel on a rope. I let the heaviness of what my mother just implied settle for a moment before speaking again.
"Wait, he..."
My mom launched into a long, drawn-out explanation involving her needs and desires, but I wasn't listening. Instead, I was testing out this new idea in my head, discovering the unexpected weight on my tongue of having to say "My dad's house." I almost missed it when she told me she'd be selling the house and moving into an apartment on The Plaza in Kansas City. I hung up.
I'm not sure which dissolution — that of my physical home or the theoretical one present in familial structure — bothers me more. I have been thinking and thinking lately, writing these long digressions on brief moments in my life while completely unable to come to any meaningful conclusions. How do you and how can you find home after the collapse of the one you've always known?
In the movie "Garden State," almost certainly a cliché by this point, Zach Braff's character muses at length about the concept of home. He concludes that everyone eventually loses the safe idea of home despite, or perhaps, in spite of having somewhere to keep their things.
I am fairly certain that home can be entirely an internal concept. I look in the mirror and see my mother's translucent skin and the green eyes that were my grandfather's. I have noticed reflections of my father's stoic nature in my treatment of situations and the way my hands shake like my mother's when I'm angry. The neatly coiled iPod headphones in my bag remind me of the way my dad used to keep every lure clean and separate on fishing trips in my youth. He also packed his lunch neatly, every morning, and never forgot the napkins.
A completely internalized idea of home begs for the kind of self-sufficiency that is usually only seen in movies, although I am quite sure that capability lies in most people. After all, everyone has that place where they feel the safest and where they can retreat to when things go badly, be it physical, a group of people or even a hobby. I just wish that were a more readily mobile concept.
My apartment in Columbia doesn't quite feel like home yet (Maybe once it's clean), and I am quite certain that separate apartments and separate parents will never be able to recreate that home feeling again. I am going to start working to build a firmer sense of belonging in myself rather than taking root in the physical.
It's going to take some work; I still always forget the napkins.