Home
What exactly does that word mean?
“I’ll be home for Christmas,” so the song wishes. I’ve been struggling to find some Christmas cheer this year. Why it’s been a struggle I’m not quite sure. I’ve been in my office this afternoon trying to capture some of that old magic by listening to a rather calming play-list of Christmas songs. Whether or not the music is working is yet to be determined, but I’m betting against it. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” promises one of the songs that we all know so well. Other songs remind us of the reason for the holiday and others talk about roasting chestnuts, as if anyone aside from street vendors in Paris actually do that. But the one about being home for Christmas, that one is onto something. If we’re going to study that song, the first and last thing we need to figure out is what the singer means by home. What is home? If you answered something about it being where the heart is, we cannot be friends. If you said it’s where you hang your hat, please show yourself out. And if you answered the question in the way that many seem to be answering it lately, by suggesting that home is, in fact, wherever income taxes are the lowest, then you’re hopelessly vapid. Home, it’s such an interesting word, and it’s a word that we’ve manipulated and mistreated. Home, it seems, isn’t a house at all. At least it isn’t to me. I grew up in my parents’ house. It was my home from birth through age 18, and it was my parents’ home for eight years before I was born. It was the home my parents brought each of their four sons home to after checking out of the hospital. It was the house that my brother died in when he was less than a year old. It was the house where my younger brother angrily punched through the glass front door when my older brother and I locked him out. The house that my mother read us bedtime stories in, using inspired character voices. It was the house that I grew up in, and in that, it will always and forever be my home. But today I have my own family and my own four walls 26
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that I now consider to be home. One of the great maturations of my life occurred when I no longer considered the house where I currently lived to be a temporary shelter. Times were I’d live somewhere until it had appreciated, a forced increase in value created through my own sweat and toil, and then I’d sell it and move on somewhere new where I could do it all over again. My current house has become my home, but is it really home? To me, it isn’t. Home is where I’m from, and whether I’m living in that old brown Dutch colonial near the lake or a white modern farmhouse in the country, home is the space between. Home is the Bay. Home is the county. Home is here. It’s in this office where I type and it’ll be on Geneva Street later when I wind down towards the water, maybe in time to catch the sun setting low over Conference Point, but probably not. Home isn’t four walls, it’s the place you’re from. That Christmas song isn’t about a house, it’s about a place. A great tragedy of our time, something that is blindly celebrated but shouldn’t be, is the geographic mobilization of the wealthy. The great exodus has begun as families move from one state to another, fleeing high property taxes or high income taxes or both. Others flee simply because they see others fleeing. They flee something that they know in favor of something new. Fleeing is all the rage. If you’re not fleeing, you’re a frog in a pot of water, or so the flee-ers condescend. They make the decision based on the math, on the lifestyle, on the number of days that the sun shines. They move because they can, they move because they feel like it. They move because their youngest daughter is a really good skier and, well, and that’s reason enough. There’s a Whole Foods in the new town and a private school around the corner. It’ll be great there, they say as they pack their last bag and head to New Town, USA. Freedom, here they come. As long as we’re together, we’re home, the wife repeatedly whispers to herself as they cross the first of several state lines.
