Home, Wherever It Is

A few breaths before afternoon drizzles into twilight, that hushed interval where a blue patina softens the surfaces of the world, October sunlight slants like a shimmering cold knife through the trees in my big backyard in Sacramento and across backyards and housetops beyond. I would open the family room’s sliding glass door and wander outside and simply stand in the day. Never welcoming the night rising in the east, a closing of light, a return to a house where the TV seemed always on, I remember always looking west—to San Francisco, the coast, the Pacific Ocean, years to come; I felt somehow drawn west. October remains the blessed month for this memory, as it was for Kerouac (October for me stands for that autumnal air, the way the day feels). Summer in its blazing glory threw the sun high overhead and winter dragged it bumping low around the sky, but October freed the light to pulse and pierce the air. I wore a light sweater against early cold and waited for the afternoon’s mystery to rise and linger. Was I waiting for something to happen? Waiting for a question unasked to reveal an answer, like a stone statue blinking dust and turning into a princess? I never knew, and still can’t hold it in my palm. The air was still, the sunlight sharp, and I stood westward as the earth rolled away. You only recognize beauty when it begins to disappear is the last line of a Mark Eitzel song during his time with the American Music Club. The day was disappearing, October disappearing, another year disappearing, and so goes life. That’s precisely what was happening, exactly the answer. And a month or so after having left home in Sacramento for life in the Bay Area (San Francisco, the coast, the ocean), perhaps feeling poor and lonely and distant, I drove home to Sacramento, walked through the family room and sliding glass door to wander again the backyard and linger in the waning afternoon light (March-April can offer similar experiences; perhaps its the changing you feel). I had left home, but the ghosts remained and waved a kind welcome, the memories imbued in the grass mowed and the silver maple climbed into telephone wires and gnarled plum tree leaning and cracking the cement porch and the pale weathered wooden fence trying to hold the restless dogs within. This backyard was home; it is no longer home, although I feel at home anytime I’m standing in the line of cold sunlight sliding through creaking trees. I have driven by the old house, my mother and father long dead, and once I met the new owners, a young family, their first home. I introduced myself to the lady of the house, and she was overjoyed to meet, anxious to show what she’s done in the house and yard. The yard had changed a bit: I think I spotted a lawn ornament, a fairytale fawn or ceramic bonneted lass gathering invisible berries. The grass appeared designer mowed, as if you’d be scolded for running scrimmage. Growing up I remember proud clumps of weeks, the edges a little unkempt. There is something sinister in the nervous demand for the manicured yard, the ever-renewed battle (waged either by you or immigrants) against wild growth; wanting a lawn that doesn’t offend or require interpretation, but pleases easily like a Christmas with Kenny G album. We had lawns growing up, but we ran and tackled and rolled upon them like dogs. I remember surprises hidden in weeds, whole societies busy with work. Oh where are the frogs of yesterday? Extinct through chemicals, those wreckers of ecological balance. But standing in the backyard no longer my own, the plum tree filled the sky, the loquat held fruit, and the rosemary towered. The lady seemed happy with the yard. She confided in me that often she felt Barbara’s spirit in the house, often thought of her, eagerly hoping my mother approved what she’d done. With tears welling up in her eyes, she received my assurance that my mother would indeed be pleased (for the most part). Here’s another line from a song, Luther Vandross singing the version I heard: a house is not a home. He meant, I believe, his digs felt lonely without his woman. But home is also not a house. When I was standing in my backyard reminiscing with the new owner, I failed to hear the lingering ghosts. They’d packed up and caught the last train for…the coast. Home disappears when the beautiful ghosts stop speaking to you. So I feel little nostalgia for that suburb in South Sac. The house is not a home. Yes, the structure is not the dwelling within. A life is not a body, but the pulsing soul bubbling in the veins and nuzzling the rib cage and rising against muscle and dancing behind the face. Where is home now? We asked ourselves this on our summer flight from Syria to California via Istanbul and New York. Possible answers: Home is where you live, your current address. Home is where you grew up. Home is what is familiar, where you feel welcome. We sit back satisfied when we are “at home.” I’m trying to get at the meaning. I first felt a strange tug of home in New York’s JFK airport during the layover for our flight to San Francisco. Carry-on luggage bouncing and flipping behind us, I’m leading the charge to the nearest bar like a linebacker on a blitz. Old ladies are shoved out of my path like wiry rookie tight ends. I don’t care how many CDs I had on rotation, only one was spinning: get a good beer that’s not a goddamn mass-produced lager, the only thing available where we live (Heineken is about the best…for what it’s worth). A micro-brew, Brooklyn’s Brewing Company’s Amber Ale, was on tap. Our waitress dully asked if I wanted a tall one. After recovering from a laughing fit that had my eyes bulging tears and dry mouth a-foaming, I picked myself up off the hardwood floor, rearranged the surrounding tables and chairs in polite order, recovered the knife and fork from the potted plant near Gate 17 where I had flung them after upending our table, and answered yes please. Of course, what you miss is home, but is home simply what you miss? (My ugly god, I’m writing like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City). Flying into the Bay Area, California felt like home because our haunts remained humming and getting along fine. We missed bopping down for beers at Jupiter in Berkeley or Cato’s Ale House in Oakland, taking our travel mugs and getting a Peet’s coffee and then pastries at Arizmendi’s on Lakeshore, seeing women walking and talking freely of all ages and ethnicities without the black shroud of invisibility covering them, buying a slice—two!—of Arinell’s NY-style thin slice pizza offa Shattuck near University, taking a walk in the Oakland Hills of bay laurel, redwood, patches of sun like stars splashing upon leaves, wading through Moe’s and Shakespeare and Co. books on Telegraph, and damn did we miss our CA friends. But in the middle of our joy I realized we were experiencing the giddiness of the initial. We were on vacation; we didn’t have to go to work. If we wanted to wake on a Wednesday morning and drive to Ocean Beach, walking along the sandy shore with the joggers and dogs, then hit the Beach Chalet overlooking the Pacific for beer and onion rings, well, we’ll just do that. If we want to meet my old musician friends for beers at Jupiter, sit in Adirondack chairs in the sun in the open air patio, passing guitar back and forth and plucking out tunes for one another like back in the dizay, then bid our farewells because we have to make happy hour at Sea Salt on San Pablo for Tomales Bay oysters on the half shell and fruity drinks, again, we’d manage. But we’re wallowing in all we’d missed: does that make the Bay Area home? We don’t own a house there. The four walls in a prison cell are familiar to an inmate: is it home? A charitable guard can pull strings and tie up a hammock in the inmate’s cell. In it, he can be comfortable: it is home? Paroled, he can return to the prison years later and revisit his old cellblock, which is now filled with producers of Reality TV shows, and the damp and cold dust and whiff of steel urine will trigger memories familiar, but he is far from home, and not comfortable, I’d wager. My long lost friend and old roommate in Santa Cruz, Helen, told me once she went home for the holidays, where she grew up on the East Coast. Sisters and brothers she had, cousins, Mom and Dad. All were there together to celebrate, but she felt dismayed at how little her family appreciated the great effort she’d made getting out there. A single woman, beat reporter for a small weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, and it was a financial struggle to get back East to join the family (who all lived within twenty miles of each other; no hike for them at all). Though she was home, she felt less at home than a stranger, a tolerated guest. Her heart, where home is supposed to be, wasn’t in it. I’m scraping for a meaning. The notion of home does, of course, include the familiar, the comfortable. I suppose I want to loosen and set adrift the traditional notion, tear it away from the tyranny of home as finally settling down, the shiny gleaming ranch-style with two-car garage of cherishing the fixed. Home is where you land, end up. If that’s the case, then let me show you a bit of real estate Hamlet calls “the undiscovered country, from whose borne no man returns,” very spacious but no views. This is your final resting place. And it’s free. Only a nihilist calls this home. We are semi-nomadic, Carrie and I, for the time. But Syria is our home, in some ways, in a narrow but essential sense, inasmuch as we cut and paste the paper maché scraps of our life in this strange new land. But rain floating from a redwood forest canopy is home when you wander underneath. The wild, free and fertile stillness that rises when the captain cuts the boat engine and you drift where the Pacific’s continental shelf drops off, hushed breathing, where whales swirl and sound, this felt like home to me one afternoon about thirty miles off San Francisco. I feel at home in all kinds of water. Icy cold granite-bowled alpine lakes, mineral rich seaweed rolling Pacific tidal waters that sparkle hues of bronze and blue, rumbling and splashing Idaho mountain rivers, clear cool Lake George whose wind-nudged waves are lapping behind me at this writing, the warm salt waters off Turkey’s coast—it’s all good. Same goes for the day. If the Weather Channel and news meteorologists depended on the likes of me to sustain their livelihoods, they’d be slouching to the poorhouse in droves. "What’s the weather going to be like today?" I don’t know, peek your head outside. Get thee hence and whoop, dance and sing under whatever skies surround you. I think the only time I wanted to check the weather forecast was when planning a backpacking trip. But even then, rain happens. Thoreau should be our guide and savior in these matters. Don’t huddle and turn against snowstorms; go out and inspect them! I feel blessed I’m at home in whatever weather heaven choreographs. “Oh, it’s a crappy day out there” you hear radio voices lament if rain is coming down and replenishing the earth and its depleted groundwater sources. This is “crappy”? Hell, you’d think they were announcing the latest round of firing squad penalties being carried out. I take the weather the way I take music: a sunny afternoon is bluegrass; rainy mornings, Joni Mitchell; overcast noons, Coltrane; whipping and raging storms, Mahler. I think I’ll manage to carve out a dwelling any hemisphere I plunk down my bags. In Syria we have our rhymes and rituals, our daily bread of dreams, we hose and squeegee the dust from the patio and pull up the outdoor furniture, check if there’s ice in the trays, tune my guitar, welcome friends and uncork champagne purchased on a run to the Turkish border. Home is less a place or predicament than dwelling emboldened by the mysterious art of living. Home is sanctuary, enclosed only to safeguard the opening to mystery of being alive. This is why holy places feel like coming home, be they stone cathedrals or Sequoia canopies or Pacific Ocean depths above which you respectfully drift, knowing life shudders underneath. Only the truly mysterious possesses the power to draw, to welcome. Arrange your fixtures and furnishings with the delicate touch handling a bouquet of flowers, vines and leaves. Wait for the feather brush of wind, and then call things that truly matter to you into presence, let them enclose you, allowing a droplet to fall into your soul like the twirl and snap of a cold October sun, the moist heart pumping in a clump of moss, the murmur in the burrowing warm dark hole that furry critters call home.