I Have No Home In This World Anymore

Over the past couple of days I have been enjoying being engaged with the Facebook group from my old hometown. It’s fun to remember the buildings, the people and the places of the years that I spent growing up. It wasn’t heaven, but it was a place where I was part of a whole cloth.  I belonged whether I wanted to belong or not.

However, in September of my 18th year I headed out to Michigan to follow my desire for college education.  I think when I left my little farm town I fully anticipated that I would return home at the end of my studies. For all my braggadocio about wanting to go out into the world I was still nervous and cautious. I figured the fallback for me would be to go home and find some work there. I think most of the people I knew thought I would end up back in Jersey.

Things and events dictated otherwise. Most of the work where I grew up was tied to factory or farm. I was scrawny and weak and myopic. None of these traits are really suitable for the kind of work available in my hometown and it’s in environs.  There really wan’t much for a college educated liberal arts type. Plus, I had too much history defining who I could and couldn’t be in that place. Once I left it was pretty much for good whether I knew it or not.

I have lived in the Midwest for 43 of the last 45 years.  I did try and go home for about 2 years.  It really wasn’t an apt fit for me.  Bit by bit, month by month and year by year my home had shifted.  Over time I had become rooted in the snow and the four seasons of the north country.

I think we Americans are basically a restless bunch. For the most part pretty much everyone I’ve ever known has wanted move, has wanted to travel, has wanted to go somewhere. Some of us have abject wanderlust. Some just have a small itch for change of scenery now and then. At the most the Jersey shore is no more that 65 miles from where you are in the Garden State.  Sometimes that drive is enough. 

It was good to have a very defined home when I was young but I still have that desire to go traveling further. I think I used up all the home Michigan has to offer me.  In eight months I am going to be on the go again.

Still no matter where I go the dust of Pedricktown, NJ will be part of the aromas of my memory.  Memories of the smell of the reeds and plants along the causeway leaving town going north will come back to me with the coming of summer. The sounds of a small town will probably be some of the last things I remember.  Remembering  one man whistling and singing as he pumped gas and cleaned car windshields will forever echo in my mind.

Home is a fragile construct.  I was lucky.

On The Day Trump Nixed His Staff from the Correspondents Dinner

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Sitting here I am at the dinning room table. Good beautiful light outside now  but it is the tail end of what has been a cloudy chilly day.  Have been running through my list of all time favorites songs to play.  Funny that, almost all of the tunes are songs of loss and hoped for, but most likely failed redemption.  This was the stuff I was listening to in my early teens and through college.  

Mission in the Rain by Jerry Garcia is a prime example.  A loser adrift Garcia's worn voice sells it. Well then there's Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death, not much there in the way of redemption there, eh?  Mostly I listened to ballads.  It is amazing I made it to adulthood listening to Ralph McTell’s Streets of London.

Back in those years I was an optimistic secular humanist.  Yeah, let us break that down.  What is an optimist? Well one perspective is that you are a person who is hopeful and confident about the future.  If you get a little more rarefied, it is a philosophy wherein you believe that this world is the best of all possible worlds or that good must ultimately prevail over evil. Yeah, this kind of dovetails with the secular humanist definition.  Secular humanism  is a belief that humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment without belief in God.

Ah optimism, ah youth, to recapture one or the other, wouldn’t that be something? As the years have passed I have lost faith in so very much of humanity.  I have become convinced that with the accumulation of possessions and wealth that we lose our capacity to be generous. With each step up the rung of winning we lose sight of those they have not reached the same level. Humans become possessive, protective, aggressive and instransigent.

It does not mean that I am going to quit trying to do justice.  It does not mean that I am going to abandon my hope that without God we can be moral.  I mean my hope in listening to those songs was that somehow, somewhere, some way there was going to be redemption.  What I feel now is that it is harder each day to fight the growing ugliness and hatred I see, a palpable dark knife wound that is forming a chasm between people.

I didn’t mean to end up here tonight.  What was really on mind was loss and loneliness. But our world has become so polluted with hatred and anger we cannot easily find our way to reflect on individual pain, on love, on loss. My heart is sick and broken.  The hearts of people I love are sick and broken. The road here has been so fast, not so wide, but oh so very fast.  

Why is it that the good all just seems to come undone?  Why is it that we cannot find a commanilty to lift out of this foul mess that is sucking us in? Was I wrong to believe that humanity could move forward without the threat of hellish punishment or the promise of crowns of gold and jewels and robes of purest white? 

I keep coming back to the definition of optimism. No matter how worn my heart feels I believe we can make it better.