Pt 1: “Home” for the Holidays
Back in my Room
I was too late, by minutes, to catch the flight from Amsterdam to the United States.
My journey was meant to look like:
Basel, Switzerland → Amsterdam → Detroit → Kansas City
Passing through airport security to begin the journey back to Kansas City, I had the usual feelings of freedom and anticipation. My backpack was full of all the clothing I need to travel for months at a time (no checked luggage for me). Electronics are in a smaller bag. My feelings were immediately tempered when I saw that my first flight would be two hours late due to wind and fog at the Amsterdam airport from which it originated. Tempered feelings morphed into feelings of dread as I realized that I would most likely miss the plane to the USA. After waiting in line for an hour, I got the news that the fog and wind had affected flights enough that the next one to the USA had already filled. The only option was to wait until the next day, unless I wanted to book another airline for € 2700 (around $3,000). My original flight cost me under $700. I decided to stay the night in the Amsterdam airport and arrive in KC a day late.
My reroute looked like:
Basel, Switzerland → Amsterdam → Salt Lake City → Kansas City
It was a long night. I got 3-4 hours of sleep in the airport but didn’t sleep much on the flight from Amsterdam to Salt Lake City. I finally arrived around 5:30 p.m. in Kansas City and got a good night’s sleep.
Kansas City is a must when I return to the States so I can get in a variety of appointments. This time I visited the doctor, financial advisor, barber, had face-to- face meetings with my editor Frances and my Spiritual Formation group. I stayed over one night with friends and went to the symphony with another KC friend.
When in KC, I stay with my former daughter-in-law Becky (Chloe’s mom), who graciously provides me a room and let’s me borrow a vehicle. This trip I tackled my to-do’s and then Becky and I drove to Louisville, KY, where my daughter Lisa, son-in-law Denis, their two daughters, and Becky’s daughter all live. We’d arrive in time for Thanksgiving and to celebrate two of the three granddaughters’ birthdays.
Recently I’ve been contemplating just exactly where to call home.
The nearly 8 hour drive gave me time to consider the question: where is home? The answer to the question has not become clear, but the question is clearer.
When Becky and I were approaching Louisville, I felt the same way I have felt in the past when driving there. I am going to visit. But that’s it, just visit. Calling Kentucky home does not compute.
I love Kansas City. In some ways it feels like home, but it is not. I don’t live there. As we pulled up to Denis and Lisa’s house, it hit me. My legal address is their house. My address is in Louisville, KY. I am a Kentuckian.
I have been out of the country for nine months of the last year. The time in the USA has included traveling to visit my three siblings in different places, traveling with a visitor from Europe to Chicago and St. Louis.
My address is in Louisville, Kentucky, and what is left of my belongings other than the contents of my backpack and small carryon, are there. I feel welcomed and comfortable in Denis and Lisa’s house, but I don’t live there. Where is my home?
I realize, I am homeless.
A year ago, after the pandemic ended, I sold all my belongings and started traveling outside the USA again, with only the backpack and a personal carryon bag. Up until that time I lived for four decades in Kansas City, Missouri and Topeka, Kansas plus an additional decade in Oklahoma City in between those two places. A number of weeks ago, when I saw a train leaving with my backpack, going on without me, I wasn’t sure I would ever see it again.
I wondered if my backpack had become my version of home.
When I got over the initial horror at having lost my backpack, my mind shifted quickly to figuring out how to get the medication that had left with it. It would be difficult, but I would get it done. I had already forgotten my travel bag on a trip to Colorado and easily replaced what I needed at an outdoor clothing store, so I knew I could get new clothing. My backpack could be replaced. It and its contents were not crucial to my sense of place or home.
My phone, iPad, and laptop were still with me. They provide the link to the people in my life. They are the tools I use in my profession as a Writer which serves as one marker of my identity at the moment. Losing them would have been so much more difficult. But, what I do is mostly saved in the Cloud, and the electronics can be replaced.
They don’t rise to the level of home.
What about the people in my life?
All the while I have been traveling, I have not had a longing to be back in a particular place in the USA. I love my children and grandchildren, and miss seeing them, but they are all independent and have full lives of their own. I love my siblings, but they have homes and families of their own.
I thrive on making connections with other people, not just surface connections, but connections that reach into the depths of who we are. I bring vulnerability to relationships and, in the ones that last, they open themselves to me in response. There is a level of intimacy, a level of trust with others that nurtures my spirit whenever we engage. At the same time, those relationships are not binding. No matter how close we are to each other, we are not obligated. We are each free to grow and go our own way at any time. In fact, freedom is essential to the level of intimacy we enjoy. Our friendship, our love for one another comes with no hook, no implicit expectation of exchanged equivalency.
Even those wonderful relationships do not rise to the level of home.
When I travel, I refuse to describe myself as a tourist wherever I am in any particular city or country or culture. I think of it as living there, immersed in the ordinary life of the people. I am not there to gawk. I want to live there, listen well enough to see the place the way they see it, to feel the history as they feel it, to catch sight of the way they see the world. My eyes have been opened to see and feel dynamics from outside the perspective of a dweller in the Midwest of the USA. I have been both thrilled by the discoveries I have made and humbled by them. On occasion I have been in a place long enough to almost feel like family. In those moments, the strength of the connection to my own family, children, grandchildren, and siblings becomes palpable and their importance in my life washes over me.
If the cliché, “Home is where the heart is" is true, then maybe that is a better answer to the question, “Where is my home?” I struggle to admit to that as an answer, partly because it sounds so trite and shallow. It just isn’t that easy. What does “heart” even mean in that context? What does the word “home” mean? I travel alone. I rarely feel lonely. I do, however, think about the price of the independence I enjoy. I am accountable to no one. I decide what to do and when to do it. I don’t have to take anyone else’s needs into account concerning what I eat, when I go to bed, or when I get up. Whom do I call when disaster strikes or aging has crossed a disabling threshold? I will turn to my family.
I have been back in Kansas City and Louisville the last ten days or so. While there is still not a singular answer to the question of Home, I realize in my gut how important these places and the people in them are. Beyond that, I do not have clarity concerning the answer to the question, “Where is home?” I am at home wherever I am, and then I am anxious to move on to the next place.
When I come to a place, the room I am in, the table on which my electronics sit, the chair in which I sit, and the bed in which I sleep are the context, and my presence there seems to constitute whatever it is that is called “home.”
This is a thoughtful piece on an understanding of home that points to the ultimate location, when put in the context of a theoretical Physicist’s view of reality.