PopcornJackTerry

I’d like to blame the strange habit I have of forgetting things on the onset of middle age. A friend of mine casually pointed out to me that I have slipped into this realm after I mentioned stopping at pretty much every rest area between Northern New Jersey and Washington, DC. I tried to blame all of the soda I drank at the party, but she said it was age more than intake. The particular brand of forgetfulness that I’m talking about requires me to say something like “Don’t forget to grab your phone”, not doing it the minute I think about it, and then not realizing I have forgotten it until I am out the door. This isn’t new, but something I’ve been doing for many, many years. The upside of still doing it now is that it helps with my exercise. My room is on the third floor, so that’s lots more stairs I get to do in a day.

In my last blog, between the opening joke and the main body, I included a reference to an article I had read earlier in the day. I meant to reference back to it and, of course, forgot. The part of the reference that mattered was the quote from the boat captain: “They moved, but they never arrived.”

I have moved a reee-diculous amount of times as an adult, both between different cities and within the cities as well. Some of the local moving was done looking for a better, more affordable living situation, and the larger moves were ostensibly done for employment changes, whether looking for a better opportunity or making a major change. That may have been the reasons I gave other people, as well as myself, but the fact is that even if what I was doing for work changed, nothing else really did, and the downside to all of this moving around was that someone who already had a hard time feeling like he fit in anywhere felt even more like an outsider. Even if I knew people where I had moved to, and in some cases knew them well, they still had established lives. It wasn’t a collection of people coming together at the same time like college had been, but rather the intrusion of a new person into an already arranged collective.

(Keep in mind that I am not implying any of my friends were less than generous and gracious in accepting me and helping me get settled. I was given places to sleep, opportunities for transportation, help in getting jobs. My friends and family have always erred on the side of overabundance when it came to helping me, and I will always be grateful, no more so than I am right now. )

The excuse that I would always create was that, as a writer, I was comfortable being the outsider, maintaining my observer status, even though I desperately wanted to feel like I belonged. That was nobody’s responsibility but my own. In fact my friends did all that they could to include me, and it was just me and my lack of self confidence that kept me feeling the way I did. People seemed surprised when I mention the issues I have with confidence and self esteem. They point out the things that I have accomplished in my life, the successes that I’ve had, the bold moves that I have made. I didn’t accomplish those through any confidence, but rather through sheer will and force to fight against how I felt about myself. The irony is that, without the self esteem to work as a foundation, I saw the successes as an exception and not the rule, and since I couldn’t relax into the my own self-confidence (because I didn’t have any) the effort that I had to maintain that level would simply become too much. I felt like that wasn’t who I was, that i was perpetuating a sham, and that everyone would soon see me as the charlatan, the imposter, that I thought myself to be. That’s why every couple of years it was just easier to take the show on the road and find a new audience, and it serves as a perfect testimony for all of my shattered relationships as it does my nomadic existence.

So you can see why that quote stuck out to me. In all my life I feel like I have never arrived anywhere. It’s an easy thing to accomplish when you grow up thinking you don’t fit in where you are. Some of my earliest memories involve conflict and uncertainty, the recognition that I was different. In a small suburban town at a young age, those differences are magnified, and I did nothing to make them any smaller. I remember sitting in the back row of my high school graduation, watching a storm approach and counting the days until I was anywhere but there.

I certainly felt like I fit in when I got to college, but looking back at my time there I can see the first episode of what would become my pattern. By the end of my second year I was enjoying many successes and feeling very confident, but as I entered my third and final year, doubt and fear replaced that confidence. I remember feeling like I couldn’t maintain what I had accomplished, and if I couldn’t do that I would be a failure. I remember worrying about how I would survive in the city, how would I pay my bills, would I find work, the same fears that everybody in my situation faced. Instead of trusting myself and my dreams, I believed in my fears. I rationalized the reasons I wanted to leave the city I had been dreaming about for years, and I began my ramblings.

In the state that I’m in these days I don’t do myself any favors. Melancholy is everywhere I look for it. Even movies with happy endings and pat resolutions make me sad, because I see in them the same results I feel have slipped beyond. My playlist of music consists of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, songs of lost love and disillusionment (although I do try and jam out a little everyday to the Dead.) Even in my now weekly trips to the library I take home at least one book that reminds me of my past. I went looking this last time for a book about the jazz age in New York City. Instead I found a work of non-fiction by Pete Hamill. Mr. Hamill is a life long New Yorker and newspaperman. I was introduced to him through ready the Daily News and have read a couple of his novels. This book, from 2004, is a history of Manhattan told through his eyes and the places he lived. The stories he tells, dating back to the earliest settlers, are centered around the lower half of the island, and are interspersed with his own stories starting in the late 1950’s. Early on in the book he talks about the other places he had lived:

For parts of my life, I’ve wandered far from my home parishes, to live in Mexico City and Rome, Barcelona and Dublin and San Juan, and have also paid rent in New Orleans, Key West, Los Angeles and Santa Fe. But I’ve come to realize that I have lived in all those places as a New Yorker. I gazed at their glories and tried to learn their histories, to define those elements that made them unique, but always I measured them against my own city. In unexpected ways, they each taught me something about New York, its strengths and terrible flaws, its irritations and its triumphs, the way learning another language teaches you about your own. But in spite of their many seductions, I always knew I would go home.

I know that I have been dancing around the issue of returning to NYC so many times that some of you are wondering if I know any other tricks. I assure you that this is not a veiled reference to an imminent move. If anything I am farther from thinking about living there than at any point in the last eight months. I am far too worried about how to accept the truth of day to day living, that not everyday will be better or even as good as the day that came before it, to begin to think about where I might or should live in the future. He does touch on a truth about NYC for me, though, that I have always known. When I told people of my post-graduate plans to move to San Francisco, everybody who knew both me and where I was headed said the same ten words to me: “You’ll love San Francisco. It’s just like New York, except…” and then they would fill in the blank: smaller, friendlier, easier to get around, more relaxed, cheaper (HA!) I let those words fill me with righteousness over my decision and never asked myself if I was so excited to move to a city just like New York, why was I leaving New York?

Accepting that if I ever do move back to New York, it will never be the romanticized version of it that lives in my head, the bigger point of that quote to me is the notion of home. If Mr. Hamill had been born out west, maybe he would have felt the same longings for San Francisco and written a stirring love letter to that city instead. And maybe some middle aged man who came of age in that city would read that book, one of many he has ingested, and lament his lost youth and wonder if returning there is the balm that he needs for his wounds. It isn’t the physical existence and the storied history of a place that makes it home for a person. It is the emotional connection. My home doesn’t exist any more. I mean, physically it does, I saw it not too long ago on Google Earth, but the ties that once bound me there have frayed over time. If anything, the binding ties I do have are ones I created later in life, when I would return, looking for a safe haven to rework my act before bringing back on the road.

I remember telling people that I would go back to Connecticut even after my brother had been in Pennsylvania for years, and my mother was close by, because CT was the home that I knew. I could re-establish my identity there. Today, now, I am more home than I have been in quite sometime. I am surrounded by my family, and that is a difference I am coming to recognize. When I got here in April, I did what I always do. I worked hard to establish myself again, to make this permanent seeming destination. Only this time, my body and my spirit was having none of it, and for the first time I have learned, awkwardly and painfully, that instead of doing the same thing and expecting something different, I should simply try something different to begin with.

Home to me is about where you are comfortable, warm and feel safe. They say that home is where the heart is, but if you don’t have that peace in your own heart, then no place will feel like home. I can work to create all of the outside signs of stability that I want, but it is no different than slapping up flimsy walls and a roof. Without the solidity of a foundation the house won’t last. I have always worked from the outside in; the goal now is to learn how to build from the inside, by trusting who I am and by believing in myself and what I am capable of.