Getting to the Point About Homesickness

It struck me a couple of years ago -- after four years here, because I’m a bit slow -- that I couldn’t be the only one among my friends who occasionally considered his long-term geographical future. It wasn’t possible that everyone else was planning to stay in New York for the rest of their lives. It also figured that unlike me, and my impractical daydreams of living in any number of places with which I have no real connection, from Saratoga to Chicago to Vancouver, my more reasonable friends would probably move, if they ever felt compelled to, somewhere within shouting distance of wherever home was before they were lured away by New York. I remember thinking to myself: We have all flocked here, and someday a reverse migration will occur.

In the coming months, three couples I know will be leaving Brooklyn for Seattle, Hawaii, and Normal, Illinois, respectively. So it begins.

When I lived in Texas, I strongly related to the New York area as home, and I always felt it pulling me back. I felt in some very real way that I had been displaced. Now, when I miss Texas, it’s small moments that come to mind, never a larger sense that I should return, though I know from having done it once that I could adjust to living there. I can honestly say that I never miss Long Island, my first home, on a deep level, because I left there when I was 14, and thoughts of going back on a full-time basis feel like regression. (It’s been a relief to realize that as intensely nostalgic as I can be, I stop short of seeking actual backward movement.)

This is what I wanted to say when I recently wrote about homesickness, but I didn’t have the time, or I didn’t think I could articulate it. Maybe I still can’t, but here goes: I don’t feel homesick for anywhere right now. So when I feel general wanderlust -- or, more importantly, when I feel a specific need to focus on a place that could be restorative and sensible -- I come up blank. So I’ll stick with the Chicagos and Vancouvers of the world. They’ll do for fantasy, but I can’t fool myself into thinking they would be home.

Homesickness

Nora Ephron had a funny, touching piece in The New Yorker last week about moving from a longtime Upper West Side residence that she never imagined leaving.

Since I've never been short on solipsism, this made me think about a couple of things, including the fate of myself and my friends in this real estate market. My sense is that many of us would love to make New York a long-term home, but it's hard to imagine there was an era in which anyone but the very rich created affordable, unchanging places for themselves here.

That's the usual NY preoccupation, though. This paragraph struck a deeper chord:

Many years ago, when I was in analysis, my therapist used to say, "Love is homesickness." What she meant was that you tend to fall in love with someone who reminds you of one of your parents. This, of course, is one of those things that analysts always say, even though it isn't really true. Just about anyone on the planet is capable of reminding you of something about one of your parents, even if it's only a dimple. But I don't mean to digress. The point I want to make is that love may or may not be homesickness, but homesickness is definitely love.

Weather-as-Home Report

Southbound, you can taste the weather
it feels like home.
--Son Volt

I always thought he was saying "I've found when you can taste the weather, it feels like home," and I've listened to that song a lot. I'm talking in the hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I liked it more as a universal thought, but oh well, the basic sentiment's the same. I would just reverse the direction.

As interesting as cultural distinctions can be, I'm frequently reminded that weather trumps almost everything else for me. This weekend's record snowstorm came just in time. With temperatures in the 50s recently, before Cupid has even made the scene, I was beginning to fear we had lost winter much too young.

I spoke to a good friend in Houston today, and told him I was essentially snowed in. He responded that it was just cool enough there to require long sleeves, and that he was idling in his car outside a record store with the air conditioner on. A quick check of the weather report for his city shows expected temps in the 70s later this week. Sure, if our entire winter had been like this weekend, when everything -- the sky above, the air in front of your face, the ground beneath your feet -- was white, temps in the 70s would sound inviting. Thing is, when it's 70 in mid-February, it's -- you guessed it -- in the low 200's in July and August.

The autumn air in Texas was frequently beautiful. (In Dallas, anyway. Most places further south than that, they call autumn Summer 2: The Revenge. In fact, I learned to love that Son Volt lyric because whenever I drove the 300 miles due north from my San Antonio college to Dallas in October or November, at some point there was a distinct, incredibly comforting change in the taste of the air coming in the car window. It kind of made Dallas feel like a second home for the first time.) But in early September, no matter where in the state, when the accumulated drag of unabated hundred-degree days had me pining desperately for a breeze that had recently visited water, that's when I knew for certain that I'd take a tough winter over a tough summer eight days a week.

Tough weekend, this one, and I loved it.