The Tale Of Two Cities

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." So begins Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities about London and Paris on the verge of the French Revolution. I'm not actually writing a review of that book, nor discussing revolutionary ideas; I simply like the title and it fits my discussion today. I've written about this subject once before, last December, in my article You Can Never Really Go Home Again, but it's an issue that keeps coming back, again and again, as I search, in my heart-of-hearts, for that 'sense of home'.

For me, the 'two cities' are Albuquerque, New Mexico and St. Louis, Missouri. They are my two cities, the two that have factored most prominently in my life journey. I lived in Albuquerque at various times as a child, and then as an adult, from 1970 - 1998. At that point, in an effort to complete social work graduate school, I moved to St. Louis, where I've lived since 1998. Having grown up in a military family (as an Air Force 'brat') I never actually had a 'hometown', at least not in the sense the term is normally used, as a place where one grew up as a child. Though I was born in Dayton, Ohio, in actuality I was born at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, at the base hospital; it just circumstantially happened to be where my father was stationed at the time [and, coincidentally, Dayton was where he had been born]. We lived there for 3 months after my birth, and I've never lived there since. (Hence, saying I was born in Ohio is, while true, not the least indicative of where I grew up.)

As a child, I lived on Guam; at Lajes Field in the Azores; El Segundo, California; Scott USAF base in Belleville, Illinois; Tokyo, Japan; McConnell USAF base in Wichita, Kansas; and at various times in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For a military dependent, it was a relatively 'normal' amount of moving about, nationally and internationally. I felt fairly stable in that regard. I once met a fellow whose father had been in the Air Force real estate agency [before meeting him, I didn't realize there even was such a unit in the USAF] who had lived in 20 different places before the age of 18. After hearing that story, I felt rather lucky by comparison!

What motivated me to write further about this subject was a casual comment a close friend made yesterday when we were talking about an upcoming trip of mine to New Mexico, upon my noting that it had been 2 1/2 years since my last visit. He said "You don't have to come back to Albuquerque every year -- you now have a home in St. Louis." Arriving at that 'sense of home' has been difficult. I have not, since 2002, had any 'salaried professional employment' locally, nor anything other than casual part-time work, so the usual 'connection due to work' just hasn't applied to developing that 'sense of home' here. (Although my friend says "You're not unemployed, Donald; you actually work quite hard, you just don't have anyone who is willing to pay you for that work.")

On the other hand, I have been dating a woman for the last 3 1/2 years who is a St. Louisian to-the-bone, and via her, I've met a lot of 'local natives'. Plus, for the past seven years, I've owned a home here; I'm deeply connected to my Unitarian Universalist congregation and, as of May 2011, am now a member of their Board of Trustees; and I have been an usher at 7 different entertainment venues in St. Louis for the past 8 years, and have developed a 'sense of family' with many of the other ushers.

My friend's comment motivated one of those periodic 'sit back on your heels and re-vision an inaccurate mantra that has run around in your head' moments. When I describe myself to St. Louis citizens, I usually say that I'm a transplanted New Mexican [which is accurate, in that I lived there half of my life]. But I usually say that, not simply because of my longevity in New Mexico -- and because I've always related far more to my maternal New Mexican Hispanic roots than to my paternal Ohioan German-English roots, but because, as noted in my previous article, people in St. Louis don't believe someone is from here unless they were born in St. Louis and graduated from one of the local high schools. On the other hand, when I'm traveling in the Midwest, I generally tell people who ask that I'm a St. Louisian, since folks outside of St. Louis aren't ruled by that limited parochial perception that is true locally [though they probably have it about whatever town they are from!].

Wherever You Go, There You Are is another great book title, this one about mindfulness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It sums up my dilemma nicely. Wherever you live, that becomes your 'world'. While I primarily have friends both in Albuquerque and St. Louis (and others scattered around the nation), for quite simply 'daily contact' reasons my friends here have more of my attention, though email and social networking have minimized the dislocation of friendships. With those media, I'm able to keep contact with my family and many good friends in New Mexico, as well as those locally. Yet, like everyone else, I tend to keep close to home. Even though the Illinois border is only about 10 miles to the east, I only on rare occasions actually cross it; one needs to have a reason for traveling and I seem to rarely have a rationale for making the trip. All of my needs are taken care of here on the Missouri side, and so when I'm traveling, I tend to travel west or south, but rarely east.

I'm hardly saying that my pattern of travel is unusual; quite the contrary, it is the 'normal' or 'average' pattern. I remember what Bill Bryson wrote in Made in America: that until 1820, most people rarely traveled more than 5 miles outside their town during their whole lives, both from lack of curiosity and because the roads were so heavily rutted, not to mention quite unsafe. I read another article several years ago in Parade, about how even though 20% of the American population is highly mobile, the other 80% continue to be fairly provincial in their travel patterns. Alternately, America tends to be a nation of immigrants, and St. Louis is very much in that vein. There are many foreign nationals in St. Louis who have become citizens (we have, for example, the largest Bosnian population in the country, of around 60,000 immigrants). And for those first generation immigrants, traveling quite far is the norm, but second generation Americans tend to be more sedentary.

When I ask many St. Louis-born people if they've traveled much outside of St. Louis, the ones who do travel tend to mention other Midwest points-of-interest. That was true in New Mexico: many people there might have gone to Arizona, Colorado or Texas, or had grown up in New Mexico, moved to California for work, and then come home to New Mexico to retire. Of course, in part that is because of economics; it is simply less expensive to travel in your local area than further afield. But what puts that economic limitation in perspective is that many people note they've never really had an interest in traveling elsewhere in the nation - or outside the United States. Their attitude is "I've got everything I need, including my extended family, right here; why go anywhere else?"

That lack of curiosity about the 'outside world' is, paradoxically, pretty 'foreign' to me. Having grown up in a globe-trotting military family, I'm used to the idea of extensive travel. While I've done painfully little international travel as an adult [primarily because I couldn't find someone else, like the military when I was a dependent, to pay the ticket], I have a profound interest in the world around me. As such, I read books about other countries, watch travel and news programs on PBS, and subscribe to The Economist, to keep 'in touch' with developments in other nations and areas of the planet.

But then there are other people I know -- many [though not all] of whom were not born in St. Louis, but rather are transplants like myself -- who do a lot of traveling, taking several international trips each year. They are 'rooted', in the sense that they don't particularly want to live anywhere else, but that doesn't stop them from traveling often. I envy them, since I haven't figured out how to afford that myself, but at the same time, I take pleasure in the vicarious enjoyment of hearing about their travels.

In summation, I guess I could say that I'm home now, right here, where I am at this point in my life. I still very much want to travel, to visit the national parks in the United States, and to visit foreign countries, if I can ever figure out how to afford such. And, if I can find a substantial scholarship, I might eventually move to Boston to attend divinity school at Harvard. But for now, this is 'home'. And while I will always have the tale of two cities [and maybe more cities someday] to contend with in my heart, I can allow myself to settle into a sense of place right here, right now, and be content with that acceptance.