There is a strange phenomenon that Californians, New Yorkers and Texans have in common with each other that they rarely have in common with people from most other parts of the country: a sort of territorial, geo-centric affiliation.
New Yorkers are routinely criticized by everyone else as being arrogant and thinking that New York is the center of the universe — a notion that New Yorkers rarely dispute.
Californians are often guilty of being just as arrogant as New Yorkers, and possess just as strong a sense of entitlement that they hail from a part of the world that prides itself on being a step removed from the unwashed masses.
And the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” didn’t come from no where. Texas is the state that is still most likely to publicly identify with their state affiliation before their national one. Though, again, that is not uncommon in either Californians or New Yorkers, either — they just aren’t always as in-your-face about it as Texans are.
There is a tremendous irony to the fact that these three states are the ones in which I have lived.
One of the things that is most common with residents of these three states — and I read a study about this several years ago that I wish I could remember where to find — that, when traveling abroad, people from these three states identify with their state before their country. When asked from where they hail, Americans from the other 47 states will typically answer, “The US.” While natives of NY, CA or TX will give a knee-jerk answer that is state-specific.
This has been weighing on my mind a lot this week. This is my first visit “home” — to California — in over a year. I have been more profoundly homesick in the past couple of months in Austin than I have since I left CA for NY back in 2005. I deliberately planned my trip to allow for the time I needed to see as many of my friends as possible, because I missed them so much.
And, as always, the visits have been wonderful. But something strange has happened, and I couldn’t put my finger on it until today as I was looking out the window of the Moscone Center from the conference: this is not my home anymore.
For most people, this is probably a “duh!” moment. And more than a few people are having a hard time understanding why I am so completely rocked by this – to the point of tears. But what I notice in the reactions of my friends is that those who think of themselves as died-in-the-wool natives, are the ones who not only understand why this is upsetting to me, but it’s also upsetting to them as well.
So the question really is, what has changed? Why is it that years after I’ve moved away suddenly “home” is no longer “home,” even though it was for ages — even when I was living farther away from it than I am now?
I honestly don’t have a good answer for that. Part of it may be the sense of distance I have with my friends. Our visits were great, but the volume of material to catch up on was — in every case — so huge that we didn’t come close to covering everything. And life goes on — they are all in very different places, have different friends, different homes, different partners, different jobs, etc. than they did when I left. Just like I do. But I’m disconnected from them all at least enough that spending time catching up made me realize that I’m farther away from them than I’d let myself believe.
And even worse, as I look around beautiful downtown San Francisco — a city that, in the bright sunlight, is infinitely more beautiful than any other city in the country (despite what New Yorkers like to think :-p) — I realize that Dorothy may have been right when she said there was “no place like home,” but so was Thomas Wolf: “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
I find this profoundly sad. Overwhelmingly so, as a matter of fact. I can’t explain what has changed and I am pretty sure it’s got less to do with moving to Texas than it just does with having been gone for just long enough. But I can’t truly articulate it — either for myself or for the people I love who find it just as alarming as I do. But it is much like my epiphany back in November 2004 that I needed to leave. It wasn’t something I could explain, and I completely understood why it was so confusing to my friends and family, but it was just something that I knew in my gut.
So then where the hell is home? Tiffany pointed out that home is probably where Charles and Zeka are. And, while that makes sense, that’s not the same thing. They are portable. Home was home because it was stable and permanent and unmoving; and the Bay Area, in particular, was home because of the deep-seeded influence it had on my perception of the world and where I saw myself relative to it. My family is more fluid, but I count on them to be. I don’t want them to be static, but I counted on my sense of home to be. And now it’s not.
I am not sure how to incorporate that into how I view my tendency to float around — after all, the thing that made it easy for me to bounce from place to place was the sense that home would always be home. That was truly why I could pick up and go from city to city, because none of them needed to be “home” if I had that waiting for me in California — whenever I decided to come back to it. Without that, I am honestly not sure what that means to my vagabond inclinations. And I’m finding the whole thing very unsettling.
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