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Statement 1: Paris is not my home.

Question 1: What is my home?

1056!

 

Obviously this is the best answer, and I miss our house dearly (and Torrey).  It seems somewhat flat and cheap to define home as only this building though.  We have resided in it for less than two years.  Being definitively not at home in Paris, I have been trying to digest what home means to me.  The easiest answer seems to be the things I miss the most, the scenes and people I find myself thinking about with a smile, or focusing on when feeling isolated and 'home'sick.

In class I often find myself daydreaming of restaurants and bars in Denver, places that are fun, bright, and familiar.  Places, however, that I rarely visited.  We don't go out to dinner or for drinks very often, so to define home as these rare occurrences is odd. 

With can of Dale's in treasured Dale's coozy.

I also frequently crave (and write about) the good beers I can have in Colorado.  But in reality, drinking beer is not the foremost activity of my leisure time in Denver, nor are my happiest times there associated with tasting good beer.  In reality, I am happiest at home when I am busy and challenged, and my craft beer experimentation generally is a function of free time and boredom.  Last fall, between graduate school, frisbee, and planning for France I bought perhaps a handful of beers in 4 months (while this was partially due to the backlog of homebrew we had, we didn't even come close to finishing off the homebrew either).  Thus, while Colorado beer may be a taste of home for me, it is not a foundation of home.

Some of my best CO memories are with these people, and only one lives in CO now.

And of course, dreams of home are first and foremost dreams of friends and family.  But neither is this paradigm linked to a concrete home.  We live in a transient and new city in Denver, and our connections run shallow.  There are many, many people that we are proud to call friends in Denver, but in reality they are only a part of the close relationships with which we are blessed.  We have no immediate family within a thousand miles (albeit very loving members of Margaret's more extended family).  Nearly all of our closest high school and college friends are on the East Coast.  I certainly am not complaining, but can I really call it a longing for home when I find myself missing good times with my pledge class, or playing cards with family in Indiana?

Question 2: Why can't my daydreams and longings in Paris define my home, and what are they defining instead?

Looking at the previous three paragraphs, I am struck by the thread that all three dreams of home are dreams of indulgences and times of pleasure.  This is a good thing- I am no masochist yearning for times of pain and hardship.  But relying on daydreams to define home is really defining our earthly pleasures, which is not the goal of this search.  Home, to me, cannot just be a source of pleasure because I do not think man is meant solely to search for pleasure; man and home are both meant to be more productive.  Our home should also be a place of growth, of solace and challenges, of nurture and labor, of procreation and aging.  It should be enmeshed in community and productivity, not just sustenance and frivolous pleasures.

Fruits of our labors.

Question 3: Who cares?  Why are you trying so hard to define your home?

Neither Margaret or I have a default place to call home from our upbringing.  Each of us moved around multiple times before high school, and our parents had moved away from the town in which we attended high school before we graduated college.  So perhaps there is some innate questioning and rebelling from that.  On a larger scale, I think this sort of searching is a facet of our generation.  The generations before us succeeded in shrinking the world, and perhaps marveled at their ability to move across continents or communicate across the globe.  For us, mobility is perhaps taken for granted, and the hyper-specificity of engagement allowed by the internet means interest groups no longer take much dedication or work.  There is a significant subset of our generation that is engaged in exploring what it takes to have firm roots in the face of these issues, and I think Margaret and I fall in that category.  I am more interested in the slow-ripening fruits of physical community than the shallow, obligation-free communications of the internet or the jaded elitism of global travelers.

On a more personal scale, this feels like a pivotal moment in our lives.  When I graduate I will most likely enter employment in an industry with jobs nearly anywhere on the globe.  We are young and don't have children (though we do have a mortgage), and will have very few obligations.  We may never have a greater opportunity to decide where our future will be located.  Being removed from many daily activities during our time in Paris means that we have had a great deal of time to think all of this over.  Defining home is the first step.

Question 4:  So, where are you from?

Denver, Colorado.  But it takes time.