Reflections on home...
i've been thinking a lot about home lately. or people from home. or what makes a home. or some combination of all of those - and i think that because my thoughts are not really formulated yet, because it is just a jumble of ideas and words and memories and gut feelings that i don't quite know how to articulate - because this isn't a well-thought out expression of my thoughts - this blog will be a rambling, stream-of-consciousness-type thing. cause sometimes that is the only way that thoughts can come out. cause that is the mood i am in right now. cause i received an email from one of my favorite people in the whole world today, in much the same manner, and it was so beautiful and it spoke to me so much that it nearly moved me to tears. (not that this is what i purport to do to you in any way...)
i was in the hospital this morning, not for me, but accompanying a student who is sick with an infected (and now operated-on) foot - he has been there for nearly 3 weeks now, i know the routine - i go, i sit, i watch bad tv with him, we talk about the other students and the program and india and what he will do when he gets out of the hospital on thursday. but today was different. today i got there and the student on duty before me, arielle (cause there must be an attendent with the patient round the clock. ugh.) told me that last night the emergency room had called up to justin's room and asked if the attendent could come down to emergency - there as another american, and she was alone, and she was sick and crying and they needed help. arielle of course went, and helped alejandra convey her symptoms to the nurses, held her hand, told her that it would be ok. and it will be. alejandra has a fever. minor, it happens. but she was scared, she is traveling, all alone - and having arielle there probably meant everything in the world. arielle can leave the hospital. arielle can email alejandra's husband in the usa and tell him to call her. arielle can stay up until 3 am swapping life stories with alejandra and speaking her language and making her feel less alone. i went in and introduced myself this morning to alejandra - sick but still beautiful, lying on her dingy bed in an indian hospital, iv in her arm, miles away from anything and anyone she knows. but we instantly bonded - much like arielle had the night before - and i know my presence there for 30 minutes, my cell phone number scratched onto the back of the daily menu, my assurance i could help her talk to the doctors - i know it made all the difference in the world. i know she felt less alone. i know that suddenly, i represented all that she knew and was comfortable with - i was a piece of home in a place far away.
how am i a piece of alejandra's home? she grew up in argentina, but went to college in california and lives there now. we have never spoken before. i don't know her last name, how many sisters she has, how long she has been married, what her house looks like. how am i a peice of home? cause i speak the same language? cause i have been to l.a.? cause we are both white, in a country where being white means being different?
and then i started thinking about how my idea of home becomes larger and larger the farther away i am from it. how when i am living in natick, i say that my "home" is the physical house my parents live in. and how when i meet people from boston, i say that my home is natick. and how when i moved to amherst, my "home" became boston. and how when i leave the country, suddenly the identity of my home, the response to "where is your home?" is "usa." and then when i go somewhere like india, somewhere on the other side of the world, suddenly "home" is the western hemisphere. i bond with germans and brits and italian travelers just because they are an other, like me. i am immediately linked to a young woman from argentina. we're from the same place.
and then the young woman asks where i went to college, and i ask where she went, and she says pomona. and i say you're kidding, my dad went to cmc and my mom went to pitzer. and suddenly the world seems small. and i'm still in a hospital room in a land far far away, but i'm there with someone who knows a space that someone i know knows...and the world is smaller, again. and home is closer?
and then i got another email today - or rather, a chain of emails, from various relatives, updating each other on what we are doing with our lives. the chain was kicked off by a silly forward - the kind i usually roll my eyes at, of a picture of a horse's ass and a picture of president bush with the caption "the power of make-up." and i responded with "I enjoyed the "power of make-up" - even from way over here my heart aches for America - for what it has become, for what it has the potential to be, and for a tomorrow that scares me. I did discover that the Daily Show is broadcast internationally once a week - the "Daily Show Global Edition" on CNN, all around the world. it is wonderful - a little piece of home (even if it is about how messed up "home" is) over here, a reminder that people ARE fighting a very important fight. A fight I often feel guilty for abandoning, at least for the time being..."
and then i wonder about what my duties to my home are - whether i should be running away or going back and fighting. whether i am running away or if i am doing what is necessary to make me strong enough to go back and fight. whether the fight is worth it. whether i have to fight for my country (not in a military, patriotic sense. in a sense of whether i have to fight my own country, or the powers and systems and hierarchies that be) at all, even if my reasons for leaving are not to escape but rather than i really am happier elsewhere. that i am not running away but rather just finding the place i am meant to be. and then i wodner if that is true, if i could make a life somewhere else, in a permanent sense - or do i want that? will i ever want that?
and then my cousin, whom i often feel more connected to than anyone else on the planet, emails me and talks about the future, and not knowing whether he can go on living, ultimately, in the usa, in american culture, but he does not know other ones...and writes "i wish for autonomy, but also for change in the world, and constant changes in life..." and everything in my body screams yes! and i want to cry because there are people out there who understand, people out there who love you unconditionally and also get it, get you...
and then, with all these emails from relatives today, i think of family. and how family is home. and i think of high fidelity, and the part where john cusack says "some people just feel like home." and how maybe that is true, maybe home is more about people than about places, more about feelings than about houses, more about identities than about street addresses and mailboxes. but then i wonder how i could ever make a home here, make a home anywhere but where my family resides, anywhere but where my home originally was...
and then everythign else ties together in my head - anna saying that i have such a clear picture of erin's cardboard star that maybe that is enough (in response to my earlier post about owning too much stuff) and how jenny's favorite quote is the part in my antonia when it says "some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again" and that memory must somehow tie into the idea of home - that a house is not a home until it is lived in, until it becomes a living identity in one's mind, until its rooms are imbued with images of people and events and words and even thoughts...and then i think of how memory changes things, makes us remember them differently than they actually happened...and of that scene in garden state when they are in the pool and they talk about home and he says "maybe that's all that family really is - a group of people who miss the same imaginary place." and sometimes i think it is depressing and sometimes i think it is so wonderfully, beautifully true...
and then i just really don't know.
but as it inspired me today, hopefully it shall also inspire you: i end with my cousin's farewell...
be beautiful.
in whatever home you seek.
posted by Marcie @ 6:08 PM
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