I’m sitting on a plane that left from Detroit at an indecent hour. Having left an immoderately bright morning behind us, we are descending into a dreary midday sky over Boston. I am crooking my neck over the two slumbering figures between me and the oval window, which is finally showing us the grey-navy bay water and some pentagonal memorial-looking stone structure. I blush, reminded yet again of what a horrible Bostonian I am. I don’t go to Red Sox games, I’ve never been to Walden Pond, and then there’s this new something that I have yet to visit and admire. We sink shakily, and I feel like my spine has wrapped it’s arms around my belly button and is squeezing. It’s the same thing I feel when I meet people whose books I have read wonderingly, the same thing I used to feel in junior high when a boy I wasn’t sure liked me looked at my lips. It is magnified on the plane, accompanied by my breathy la ilaha ila Allah’s. But the delightful-scary sensation isn’t caused only by the plane playing hopscotch on the wind. I’m excited to come home. Then I realize what I have just thought: home.
For years, maybe ever since high school, whenever I have come back to the place I am most rooted in at the moment, I have always thought about it like this: I’m going back to New York. I’m back in Amherst. I’m returning to Cairo. Everywhere, including Boston, has been the place that I happen to be living at the moment. I haven’t lived – that is, haven’t placed my bed – in any one room for more than nine months at a time since I was seventeen. That was nine years ago. Nothing has felt solid. It was all slipping through my fingers all the time, and this too might be slipping, but at the moment I’m ignoring that possibility. Suddenly, magically, Boston has become my home.
Few things can compare to the shivery thrill of the familiar. The beauty of this particular pleasure is so rare. New, bright and shiny things have an easy time fascinating us. But when you find yourself peculiarly enthralled by, say, your toaster, as opposed to the new iPhone sitting on your desk – that is a special moment.
Oh, how I love thee. Let me count the toasty mornings...
Now, I know that I have an unreasonable tendency to romanticize anything and everything that could possibly be construed as wholesome or New Englandy. Let’s leave that aside for the moment. Because what I want to say is this: what is familiar, known, comfortable already, the love of these types of things offers us a comfort incomparable to what is new and exciting.
This is what is easy: it is easy to fall in love with the new curve of a soft cheek, the sharp green smell of a new jacket, the inevitably surprising softness of a new hand. This is what is difficult: to hold hands for the 857th time and feel your heart jump a little, the priviledge of being beloved, and companionably touched, by this person still impossible to take for granted. To fall in love is no achievement. To stay in love? A feat of wonder.
You knew I was going to do that.
Of course, I’m as clueless as everyone else (except, apparently, our darling President and his lovely wife) when it comes to the actual realization of this feeling with another person. Generally, I am enamored more of the old than the new. I’m hoping this is a good start. But I’ve found myself changing, as well – where I used to think that I would never manage to be anything other than a die-hard country bumpkin, I find myself more and more unable to imagine living in Amherst again – or any place like it. I have started to enjoy the smallness of the city and its possibility, the thrill of meeting someone at my local cafe and then realizing as I walk home that we live on the same street. I find that there is something peculiarly enjoyable in having so much access to so much life by foot and bike, and in passing so many people on the street. I used to think that there was nothing I would trade for the pleasant, breezy solitude of an aimless country drive – but I find now that a stroll by the river or through residential streets with a friend is preferable.
It is not the promise of newness that the city offers me. The city is, in most ways, just as mundane as the country. We have routines just as those in the suburbs do. We have circles of people we are used to seeing, grocery stores we visit, the baristas that can greet us by name. I don’t attend every lecture or exhibit; I am not persistently aware that the next person walking through the door of my office could be someone I’ve never met before – I don’t live my days in anticipation.
What is it? Perhaps Boston has bred into me a love of rotaries and an endless supply of unnamed streets – or the Irish-y tendency to nickname places with the most endearing possible epithet: Southie, JP, Dot. As though the places are good childhood friends.
Maybe it was only a matter of time, and no matter where I had laid my head for most of the years since graduation it would have been the same. Perhaps I could have felt the same way about Cairo, or L.A., had I remained in either place. Perhaps it was a matter of knowledge and connectedness; I know more Boston history (what could be more charming than a whole sprawl of roads built on cow paths?) than any other place – excepting maybe Amherst. And then there is that so many of those I admire and wish to emulate have at least passed through this city: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Barack Obama, Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Malcolm X, Jhumpa Lahiri.
It could also be my stubbornness. It might be easy to love Florida, with her sunny promises, or L.A., because she flirts with fame – or even the slick, forward New York, all gaunt limbs and labels. But Boston, who has given us so many people that make us proud to be American, whose people do ridiculous things like throwing tea into the ocean and naming walls in ballparks ‘The Green Monstah,’ what of her? Maybe we could use some more street signs; perhaps we could do without a Bertucci’s or Cheesecake Factory here and there. Perhaps we’d have more good, old-fashioned summertime fun if we didn’t risk serious infection by dipping a toe into the Charles – but really, where’s the excitement in that?
I don’t need things to be so easy, so sunny, so sophisticated. The New Englander in me recoils a bit from these things – the moment I decided I couldn’t stay in L.A., I was watching a nipped-and-tucked woman draped in gold lamé and skin-tight everything shuffle into a hippie-vegan brunch spot in stilletos. On a Saturday. I don’t want to be that stylish – or primped – I just want to eat my organic tofu scramble in my jammies, thankyouverymuch. I mean, what are Saturday mornings for?
Seriously?...like, in the daytime?
Ultimately, I suppose, this feeling continues to be a mystery. And now that I am so close (less than five months – and counting) to maybe-leaving Boston, it feels more present – and more precious. What is it to be home? To love a thing?
Muppie takes the Fifth.
