No Place Like Home?
Variations on a theme sparked by wildfires
My daughter lives in Los Angeles. She is seven months pregnant.
When fire flared up in the Hollywood Hills, she and her husband took the precautionary measure of leaving West Hollywood at least for the night. Too close for comfort, they reasoned, even if not an evacuation zone.
The Sunset fire was contained pretty quickly and they were back home the next morning.
I live 3,000 miles away, an hour north of New York City in the home my daughter grew up in.
Home can be a haunting word, especially in the wake of witnessing the apocalyptic destruction of the wildfires that decimated Los Angeles.
Before Dorothy can find her way back from the dream journey a tornado has thrust upon her, she has to say the magic words — there’s no place like home. With a click of her ruby red slippers, she makes a trope of what it means to be someplace that connotes comfort and love.
At the other end of the rainbow Thomas Wolfe conjures a trope of a different color with his sprawling novel, You can’t go home again.
More than previous generations, Baby Boomers like myself do not live within easy reach of our children. They come home to us for visits, then go back home to the place their own journeys have made them settle.
Follow your bliss, said Joseph Campbell to the generation in which I came of age.
If I didn’t exactly say those words to my daughter, they were implicit in the encouragement I gave her to explore what the LA entertainment world had to offer an aspiring TV comedy writer. Maybe she would not end up far away. Maybe she would. A moot point now as aging and the passage of time make me long to be within a drive’s distance from her. Making peace with long-distance nurturing is easier said than done.
All of which has me thinking of that place called home as less absolute and more a notion fixed mostly in our hearts and minds. It’s easy, especially during holiday times, to step into Dorothy’s shoes, feel a longing powerful enough to brave air travel delays or long drives with stop-and-go traffic to get to our destination.
It’s just as easy to avoid it all, stay put, not get caught up in the lure of a place that is no longer and may never have been all it was cracked up to be. Time and distance have a way of bringing perspective.
There are too many people — homeless people, abused children — for whom there’s no warm, fuzzy feeling about home.
Nomads make their home wherever they are.
Immigrants, many of whom risked their lives for a better one in the U.S., now risk deportation back to an uncertain future in the frightening homeland they left behind.
A house may or may not be a home.
A reporter on a TV news show is talking to a Black man in Altadena, California, who starts crying as he stands in the rubble of what was was his home, the house he grew up in. Everything gone. Memories made there risk fading without the tangible things to validate and spur them: coffee cups on the kitchen table, photos hanging on walls, the couch and TV in the living room.
Multiply that image by thousands and it just touches the surface of collective tragedy, even trauma, of what it means to suddenly and decisively have no house to go home to.
My own visits to the home of my childhood — two bedrooms, one bathroom, five people in a Brooklyn middle-income housing project apartment — were a mixed bag of emotions. Love captured in my mother’s smile, my father’s silly jokes. Walls etched with the sadness of an unhappy marriage. Aunts, uncles, and cousins stopping by on any given night. It was easy for me to feel consumed by it all.
Not long after graduating from college, I moved to Manhattan, just enough distance, an easy subway ride away when the Jewish holidays rolled around. Like Proust with his madeleine, just entering the apartment would spur childhood memories of waking to the smell of pot roast and chicken soup simmering on the stove. Returning to the fold for a few brief hours grounded me in some ways. Even so, too many people in too small a space and my studio apartment, two cats anxiously awaiting my return, looked better by the minute.
We move, we resettle, and still it’s the home of our childhood that retains its hold, for better or for worse.
“The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home,” writes Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. “Each one of its nooks and corners was a resting-place for daydreaming.” At its best, that first home of ours was synonymous with shelter. In our memories, we picture people who made us feel safe.
Safety and happiness are rooted in the Spanish word, querencia, which connotes a place we feel most at home.
The very first notes of “At Home,” a piece by the Norwegian jazz pianist and composer, Tord Gustavsen, on his album, Being There, fill my heart with an unrelenting ache. Melancholy, meditative music has a way doing that. Even the the happiest of childhoods are, in retrospect, riddled with something lost to us.
As the toxic dust from the LA wildfires settles, I picture thousands of displaced families picking up the pieces of their upended lives, one step at time, coming to grips with what it really means to start from scratch when all is lost.
And I picture my daughter, thankfully not displaced, doing just what a mother-to-be does in preparing for the day she will bring her own daughter home.
