Losing Home

Sometimes you don’t want to go home again.

For most, I guess, it happens in college or when you first move out of your parent’s house and you are on your own for the first time. Those first trips home, you expect and demand that your parents preserve everything as it was so that you can have you cake and eat it too. But then the day comes when you arrive and realize that it is no longer your home. You are a visitor and it has an uncomfortable feeling about it. Suddenly, you no longer want to be at your old home but you are wishful for your new one wherever that is.

Home has changed.

I remember driving through the state of Tennessee on a freezing December night to get home for Christmas with my parents. The wife and kids had left a week earlier so I was alone. This was as lonely as I have ever been. I sang Christmas carols at the top of my lungs and couldn’t wait to return home. When we arrived, my folks were into my kids, and I really didn’t want to be there any way. I wanted to be beside the ocean. So we went and got a room in what is now the Atlantis Inn and spent the day after Christmas there. Mom and Dad kept the kids.

I was glad that I was there. I strolled along the beach. I wandered into Doc’s Bar and listened to the music and played bumper pool. I think that my first wife stayed in the room. At least that is the way that I remember it.

The next day, we picked up the kids and returned to Louisville, where I was experiencing way too much success way too early in my life. And I resumed crashing and burning, which is what I was doing at the time without knowing it, but somewhere in the back of my head I knew where I wanted home to be. Not at the old home, but on this island. On Tybee, like most islands as my friend Jane Fishman taught me, where everybody is either running to, or from, something.

I was running to. And it happened. I have lived on this clump of sand for 21 years now. Only St. Martin competes with for my love of this place.

Anyway, home is a relative thing. It comes and it goes. Every morning I walk into a shelter and greet people who have lost home. I welcome them to where they are. Because where we are, is home. And if we do not know that, then the problems begin. And we all have enough problems.

So, stop reading and take a look around you. Smell it. Feel it. Touch it. Welcome home! Because that is where you are!

And if it doesn’t feel right, leave. If you have lost home, find it again. Because everyone wants to be at home, because in the end, there is no place else worth being!