Labyrinths 2: Here and There

“Obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all my days.”

I read in an essay as published on Granta’s online edition the following sentence, “But perhaps the truth is that a person only has two permanent residences: the childhood home and the grave.” This was contained in some broader statement on Brodsky but that doesn’t concern me at all. A homily like this, couched so in the declarative language of the analytic essay, stands out, arrests, for better or for worse. We have the completely generalized, de-personalizing “residences;” the generalized, hyper-personalizing “home;” and the finality and universality of “the grave.” These are the three categories, packed to the brim with presumptions in each, into we all must fall were we to accept any forward momentum with the piece in general. It’s a nodding sentence, one that makes you either nod in encouragement with its keen profundity or nod to sleep. I sleep.

The most obvious and, considering the itinerant nature of so many people in my generation, surely the most widely held objection is that there is no one home. I don’t pretend my childhood was anything but one filled with decidedly average experiences (the details are dear, but they are dear only to me), and a remarkable fortune in love and support. Surely the recipe for a poor artist, if you believe in such idiocy. But it was one that has no arresting childhood home.

On one hand, I moved at what Freud might have regarded as a fairly unfortunate period in my developmental life, from Vermont to Maine at age nine. No great abyss, to be sure, but to a boy of nine, an expanse incalculable enough. What still amazes me, however, is how keenly I was old enough, self-conscious enough, to have formed permanent impressions whose memories linger on. I presently remember how I then compared one place to the other with mild but growing disfavor. The first relocation my family made I was far too young to possess then or now any hint of remembrance, so for all that matters that wide lawn on a hill in Vermont was the childhood home made incomplete. Vermont always seemed so much more ancient, lived in, filled with so much more, what I couldn’t have known at the time I’d come to know as character. It was utterly imbued, then, with the magic of a childhood at the mid-point of being experienced.

Needless to say my transition to Maine was a rocky one. Everything about that new home felt tacky and new, though for an outside agent to look at that house as it is now would realize that impression's absurdity. But that, I think, is what distinguishes what is a childhood home from the uncoupled seeking for home that runs a vein through so many of our lives. Every time I say “I’m going home” – from work, or from a bar, or somewhere other than where I spend most of my nights – it feels starkly ingenuine.

Sure enough, my parents’ house when it’s filled with the sounds of my closest family, that has the impression of this mythical home that, while not exactly sought, is often, sorely, missed. I don’t think much of the exercise of trying to discern which environmental factors caused this rift, but at the same time, as this catalog of the home is populated, I find – and I would wager that this is true for many others who feel uncomfortable in delineating exactly what was the “childhood home” – by more and more locales.

The grandfather’s house, with a wide expanding first floor that arched to a point, cozy but immaculate kitchen, close-ceilinged ground floor leading to rocky under-porch patio to the field overlooking Cayuga beyond; the deeply-oaked Great Uncle’s house, as sylvan in its lands as it was in its interior, deceptively nearer than Ithaca but whose journey seemed impossibly longer, housing one of the most tolerant Great Danes to have ever lived; the long lost house in Ocean City, New Jersey, where we always arrived during the night, where it was always midsummer hot, where the faint, almost gone odor of long-dried horseshoe crabs and dust and ancient wood permeated utterly; these places all possessed the imprint of a stark but ghostless antiquity. These are the locations where a lonely boy transplanted to Maine, old enough to know that ghosts exist and knew of their dangers and rewards, could populate with the myths of the timeless spring and unending winters of the original, that unhaunted house in Vermont. For they are not ancient but timeless – never have I entered any of those houses since that final departure; they are all that idyll of home, converging into the one.

I wonder, now, if I was in fact fortunate in this regard as well; fortunate beyond measure. With that seismic break I can point to the geography of my childhood, acknowledge the risen ridge, and hold inviolate the valley that remains innocent forever.