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THE NARRATIVE ARC
Where’s Home To You?
Mine’s very specific
The table is still going strong. It’s a good table, and it’s held up all these years. My parents got their kitchen table for $50 at a garage sale thirty years ago, when they were students at Boston College. That was for the table and four chairs.
A month ago I flew to Wisconsin to meet my brand new niece. I shuttled back and forth between my parents’ house and sister’s house. In a heart-to-heart with my mom at my parents’ kitchen table, the one that is still going strong, I told her I have always appreciated their house. My parents bought their house twenty-seven years ago this week.
Recently at my running group, which Raja refers to as my beer group since we run and then drink beer on Wednesday nights, I was talking with a few of the others about the concept of home. One friend from the group is Egyptian but grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. He only visited Egypt in the summers as a kid, but felt strongly connected to the Egyptian diaspora, and later moved here to the US. Similar to Raja, in some ways. Another friend spent part of his childhood in Israel but no longer feels connected there.
We talked about home and identity: how you can live somewhere for a long time and never feel at home there, or live away from somewhere for a long time but still…
