From my earliest memory through my preteens we lived in the same house. I’m given to understand that I lived somewhere else briefly upon birth, but I do not remember remembering such a place even in my Dreams and think I have not seen pictures of it. I vaguely recall my mother pointing to a tall apartment building as we sped along some major artery in the New York metropolis and saying something about us having lived there once, but the outside certainly did not look familiar and I could form no image of the inside. Since my earliest memories recall looking through the bars of my crib, and that was at the house, I must have been too young to remember more about that apartment than the faces of my parents. In my mind, the house on Brookside Drive in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, was home. I can still give you the street address, phone number, and zip code.
Home was a place where nightlights were superfluous. I could walk from any bedroom to the bathroom in complete darkness, and put my hand on the light switch without turning my head toward it. I not only knew how many steps were in each staircase, but had such a perfect internalized understanding of where they were, how high was each riser and how deep each platform, that I never worried about missing a step as I raced up or especially down them in a cacophonous drum roll of feet which probably took years off my mother’s life. Over time, places that had been mysterious dark corners became friendly hideouts, whether the crawlspaces alongside the upstairs bedroom, the space under the basement stairs, or the access behind the furnace. I could even walk the woods behind the house at night; I remember finding my way through to the other side and back the first time.
We left that house when I was a mere dozen years old.
The new house had been built for us; that is, my parents found it while it was under construction, and made several alterations to the plans to suit their hopes for a home. I was not there long. In six years I left for college, making day trips home on weekends at first and then vanishing only to visit on longer vacations. I married before I was out of school, and never again lived there. Looking back, this never felt so much like home as that house on Brookside Drive. The stairs were not so familiar nor so friendly, and although my pounding racing feet on them were undoubtedly louder in my teen years than they had been in my younger days, they were never as confident. My brother and I rearranged our bedroom furniture several times, always to the distress of my mother who liked none of our ideas, in an attempt to make this new bedroom feel as roomy as the upstairs enclave we had shared before. We didn’t spend much time in that room, however, as we were always on the move as high school kids, and there wasn’t much to do there besides the homework we generally avoided and the sleep for which we had too little time.
Yet parts of this house became home. I created a work area in the basement, a place where I could write my songs and repair my electronic musical equipment. I frequently withdrew there when I was home, as it had become my space where I could have a free hand. My mother, who expected our bedrooms to be spotless and our desks clear when not in use, recognized the hopelessness of trying to impose any order or neatness on the dozen foot-high piles of papers and the makeshift trays and shelves of miscellaneous parts which covered the several pieces of furniture impressed into my service–an out-of-service kitchen table, a desk, a file cabinet, a large table whose intended function I cannot now fathom, and the several boards ramped between these to increase both the surface area on top and the storage space beneath. I put posters on the walls above these tables (it was not permitted that we would secure anything to our bedroom walls, as it would mar the surface), and moved a piano into the space, piece by piece over a year or so.
Only the piano remains in the basement; my youngest brother took over the rest of the space upon my departure, and the furnishings were scattered into other services. The bedroom, meanwhile, sports a layout preferred by my parents. I sleep in it when I visit them, but it is not much like being home. The familiarity of the surroundings (I can still walk to the bathroom in the dark) compensates only partially for the bed I have outgrown and which is no longer comfortable, and the sense of displacement I have there. It does not have that feeling of being in my own room.
Of course, it has been some thirty years since I was eighteen; that’s five times as many years that I have not lived there as that I lived there. I sometimes wonder whether the old Brookside Drive house would feel more like home. Some say you can’t go home again, because the things that made home home are no longer there. Perhaps there is some truth to that.
There were a flurry of places we tried to call home in the first years of our marriage. Three were apartments in private homes, one a small rented house whose structural integrity might have been dubious. I have a somewhat nostalgic feeling for these places. The one house has since been demolished and replaced by something prefabricated. If I had untold riches, I would probably waste a substantial amount buying up properties familiar to me. I have fond memories of times spent in the house my maternal great grandfather built at twelve twelve Raymond Street in Schenectady, early in the last century, and the one a few blocks from my boyhood home in which my closest cousins were raised, and the one that was my father’s boyhood home on the edge of Sardis, Mississippi, where I spent bits of two or perhaps three summers. All of those properties have passed out of the family now, and I feel like bits of my larger home are gradually slipping away. However, we eventually finagled a place of our own, a place we made home for fifteen years during which five children were born.
That particular story has a sad ending, and we had to say farewell to that house. For a couple of years we were adrift; then we landed in the new house.
There is a sense in which the new house became home immediately; there was a lot to love about it. Of course, it took time before I could find the bathroom in the dark, and I’m not certain I do know the exact number of stairs to the basement despite frequent treks to the laundry and larder therein. Yet it does not so much feel like home–at least, not in the sense that it all feels like the place I belong. There are places within the house that are comfortable; my office is reminiscent in feel and appearance, although not in size or layout, of that basement space I once created.
Yet as I recently crawled into bed next to my wife of nearing thirty years (our twenty-eighth anniversary is two weeks away), I realized that now it is not the place that makes it home, but her. I remember now some time ago when she observed that we had been married for more years than we had been single before that, and it is almost as difficult to remember that milestone as it is to remember life before her. Oh, familiarity of place is important, the knowing how to find the bathroom in the dark, the feel of the mattress and the fluff of the pillow, the personal space of my own office. Yet somehow none of it would be home without her, and almost anywhere could be home if we were both there.
As I started this article I was wondering what makes a house a home, and how our characters, most of whom are vagabonds and vagrants for at least part of their careers, ever get that feeling that means being home. I conclude that I don’t have that answer, and maybe some of those characters never can know that feeling, never can go home, never can recognize home in a new place. Finding your way home is something special, and not everyone does so in life or in fiction.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
