Thanksgiving is next week. Where are you going? Are you going home? Back to your family’s house? The house of your birth? Your parents’ house? If all of these places refer to one brick house surrounded by one white picket fence inhabited by one set of people, what, if anything, differentiates them?
Class is done for the day. Are you headed back to your dorm? Back home? Is there some moment when the place you currently live becomes “home?” Must it supplant a previous “home” in order to take the title?
In short, where, what and when is home, and can you have more than one?
Traditionally, the answer is the place where you live with your family. But maybe home is and can only be your childhood home, complete with your childhood bedroom with your childhood bed, sheets, wallpaper and posters. But what happens when your big kid bed becomes a non-racecar-shaped socially acceptable bed? What happens when you realize that your “Babar the Elephant” pillowcase only perpetuated a colonial worldview and it is replaced with plain white? Can you still call this place home—this room with walls that lack pictures of dinosaurs?
Unless your concept of home is bound by an overwhelming sense of place and time, you probably can. More likely it is the physical characteristics of your home, like your sorely missed dinosaur wallpaper, combined with your experiences with those who lived in it, that shape your conception of home. Consequently, time and the changes it brings become integral factors that influence your sense of home.
When your beloved Lassie moves on to doggie heaven—which of course is in reality a factory in eastern Germany built during the Soviet era that manufactures a low quality dog-based glue—can the floor Lassie once slept on continue to be the floor of your home?
When siblings move out—to college, to take a job in that Eastern Bloc dog glue plant (tough times stateside) or to form a home of their own—you may begin to lose the sense that the place where you grew up is home. The same certainly goes, as I imagine, when your parents leave to live in a community for active seniors in Boca Raton, Fla. (or wherever goyim go when they grow old).
Add on top of these changes your transient post-high school, pre-“settling down” lifestyle, and suddenly your room becomes the guest bedroom. Or worse, it’s converted into an office with a pullout mattress, its metal bar jabbing into your back as you sleep as a constant reminder that you are cramping your family’s post-you lifestyle. College and life as a nomad can alter where you consider home to be.
Perhaps as a freshman, you called Duke “school” and your hometown “home.” Maybe then, as a sophomore or junior, Duke and your hometown shared the “home” designation. Later, as a senior, the balance may have shifted fully, transforming Duke into the Kansas to your Dorothy. Unfortunately for you, however, your Kansas will get blown away by the tornado that is graduation, and off you will wander in search of home again.
As we go on from college, it becomes even more difficult to pinpoint home. Can the place we live during a year-long internship be home? When we move far from our hometowns, far from Duke, does our German Willkommen mat welcome us home, or does it welcome us simply to the foreign place we live within some stark apartment building?
It is conceivable that you can manufacture home outside of your hometown or a pre-made community like Duke in the limbo years of your twenties before you settle down, but the prospect of this gypsy life is in many ways frightening. Perhaps this is why some fail to launch. This is why in Italy, where the average age for moving out of the parental household is a staggering 36, the government offered tax and other economic incentives in 2007 to encourage mammoni, a term equivalent to “mama’s boys,” to leave home.
But if you are not a mammone, there is adventure to be found in the fluidity of home, and excitement in the rogue wanderer lifestyle. Doesn’t Sarah Palin look like she is having fun since she went rogue or became a maverick or whatever it was that she (or her ghostwriter) talks about in her book, which I assume you have already read?
Well, bad example, but it could be liberating.
Jordan Rice is a Trinity senior. This is his final column of the semester.
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