There’s No Place Like Home

In anticipation of everyone’s favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, I took a moment to consider home.

It doesn’t much matter where you live, over time you will become inured to the point of taking home for granted. You could be from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Eureka, California, or Minot, North Dakota, and home’s charms, whatever they may be, will make your heart long for the comfortable and the familiar.

I spent my working life on the road. Wheels up at 0h-dark-30 on Monday morning, returning home Thursday night. Work took me to every corner of this country. The first time I was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I scratched my head and thought to myself why-oh-why would anybody live there. It was old, the infrastructure crumbling, even the Eighties, and the weather is miserable. Or Lafayette, Louisiana, where it’s unspeakably  hot and muggy in both winter and summer. Yet home is home, and people prefer it to anywhere else. Even if you’re from the worst imaginable place, Shangri la has nothing on your hometown. Sure, you’ll say, it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

It is irrational and completely interesting: we take home for granted. This was really underscored for me recently when my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson visited our little SoCal beach community from their home in Denver (also, in my estimation, a great place to live). Coming over our famous bridge, my daughter looked up and said, “Your life is totally detached from reality.“ I said to her, only half kidding, “Yes, we used to have to take copious amounts of drugs to get this detached from reality. Now I achieve the desired effect for free, and there’s no hangover. All I have to do is cross the bridge.”

When, as a young man beginning a long career, I informed my mother that I intended to move from Phoenix to Atlanta. All the blood drained from her face. She wondered how I could leave that beautiful desert to be transported back in time to chain gangs and men with whips on horseback keeping slaves in line. I reminded her that that was 150 years ago; she reminded me that when we had moved from Lincoln, Nebraska to Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1961, we had endured segregated schools, movie theaters, lunch counters and everything retail to the degree that when she took my brother and me to see Walt Disney‘s Pinocchio in the town square, we were greeted by signs over drinking fountains and bathroom doors that said “whites only” or “colored only.” She wanted to remind me that we were not that far removed from the pre-civil rights era.

Fast forward 20 years and my friends in New York and Los Angeles were continually asking me why in the world I chose to live in the South when I could live in the liberal Northeast or on the West Coast. I was a social activist at the time, chairing the board of the nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog group, Common Cause, and I informed them that I was staying in the South because that’s where the fight is.

My mom was from the Bronx. She took the subway downtown to school at NYU, stayed in Greenwich Village listening to jazz until midnight, then took the train home. When she fell for my dad, a Nebraskan who knew not of jazz or subways, let alone the Village, she had to get out an Atlas to see exactly where between New York and California the Cornhusker state lay. To her friends and family, that move to the Midwest was unthinkable. You see, wherever it is, home wins over any other prospect.

Our situation is dire. So bad in fact, that I can’t even write about it this week. You can’t open a newspaper or magazine without reading about the dreadful and divisive effects of political sectarianism. We are divided to the degree that some are willing to do anything to advance their cause, including destroying the fabric of our democracy. Honestly, there are days when my despair outpaces my sense of humor and my patience for my fellow man, when I think we are on the verge of actual civil war (assuming it hasn’t already started, which is not that great a stretch). Our exploding tribalism is depressing, and just can’t be my subject this week of giving thanks for family, home, and country.

Next week, I suppose I have an obligation to get back to current events and the things that divide us, but for this week, I’m very happy to write about home and hearth—one of the only things we all agree upon.

I wish you a happy holiday, hopefully at home, in the warm embrace of family and friends.

©2021 Jon Sinton