The Wanderer

David Hockney's "Pearblossom Highway #2."

As I cross the mid-point of my life and move toward third base I always find myself wondering where is home?  These thoughts have recently come brilliantly to the forefront as I not long ago made contact with a distant cousin who is in the oil industry.  He lives a life of wandering that makes my own seem humble.   While Texas is his home his journeys carry him to Russia, Egypt, Oman, Yemen, Kazakhstan and East Africa.  Oh the old saying, "Home is where the heart is." has a certain ring to it but does it really mean anything?  As human beings we associate experiences with places and they color our minds in a collage of memories.  For some these are all close to home and for others, they span the world.  I often wonder if those that never lived a vagrant life are more satisfied?  They must feel so connected to the place that they live.  Like it is a part of them and they a part of it.  Are they happy with this or do they ever look longingly outward at the world they never discovered?  When I was a child my parents took me with them on two occasions to Europe.  I remember asking my grandmother one day if she ever wanted to visit Europe.  "Oh Pat," she told me, "there is still so much in America I have never seen."  I stared blankly back at her wondering why didn't she desire what I did. 

In forty-four years I have discovered many places and lived in many more.  Alaska, Oregon, Washington DC/Virginia, Austria, Bolivia, South Carolina.  Each has occupied significant chunks of my life leaving special and unique impacts.  Traveling, I have visited South America, Europe, Mexico, the Middle East and Asia.    It is a laundry list of memories and experiences.  Some so wonderful they stay glowing in my heart, others left behind and forgotten.  But where is home?  Was it where I grew up in Alaska?  How I loved my youth there but I could never go back.  While the wilderness and nature was the closest thing I have known to God, the cold would kill me.  Was it Bolivia?  What a wonderful six years of adventure but it is not my culture and when I left, it was time to leave.  Is it the Philippines?  For my wife it was her home yet for me, I always feel a little out of place.  Is it South Carolina?  I have lived here longer than any other place since my childhood yet the attitudes, politics, outlooks and opinions of the people who live here largely seem as foreign to me as a Bedouin in the desert. 

There is a strong desire in me to recreate the good memories.  To find the special places again yet I know I can never go back.  Life however, is not just places, it is the people that populate them.  It is the  people who I intersected with at a perfect point in time yet truth be told, I will never be there again.  Memories are amazingly complex. Inside my soul I find this gnawing desire to recreate the impossible and try to step back in time and rediscover a memory.

In Los Angeles, California there is an old 1920's era neighborhood in a community called Eagle Rock.  It is set against a hillside and a winding one lane road bordered by flowering shrubberies leads past houses nestled against the hill.  Stone mortared paths rise up inclines finding their way to house doorsteps at their end.  Garages edge the street carved out of the hill itself.   This was the house and neighborhood my grandparents settled in when they moved to Los Angeles in the 40's from Indiana and Buffalo, NY.  I don't know why I have such powerful emotions about this place.  I can remember shadows of incidents and fragments of memories.  Some are only recalled by photos yet others still exist on their own.  I remember my grandfather's tomatoes growing behind the house and wooden floors inside.  I remember having a birthday there.  I remember my grandfather removing his dentures and holding them in his hand, chasing me around the house as I ran terrified and screaming.  I remember playing ball in the yard and a catchers mitt I still have.  I remember leaving to drive to Dodger Stadium to watch the baseball team my grandmother loved.

I have gone back to visit from afar and sat with tears flowing from my eyes.  Where they came from and why they fell I am still not sure yet they were a powerful testament to something deep inside.  I wanted to knock on the door and tell the current owner that I loved this spot of land yet knew they would never, they could never understand.

My grandparents eventually moved for their jobs to another part of LA.  They said they were afraid the area was going down hill yet in the end the sliding slope was more in the neighborhood they moved to then the one they left.  I visited the other house as a child and have even more vivid memories of it yet it was never the same.  I have never found it again, for some reason, it was just a house.

I wonder if I will ever find my home or perhaps, it doesn't exist.  Maybe, it never did.  Still, as I walk through life and check the boxes along the way memories emerge.  Beautiful memories that make me want to return, want to find something again I never will.  I suppose life is a journey and must be seen as such.  It is a winding road through a forest.  Some parts are dark and others are beautiful meadows, filled with flowers and open to the sun.  Darkness, while cold and distant will always be a part of the path that will forever guide me on my way.

David Hockney

Someday, my journey will end.  Until that day arrives I will seek the company of those I love and know in my soul that in some way they are my home.  They are my life.  As I grow older it is harder to move.  Maybe it is the stuff, maybe it is the security.  Whatever the reason, it still doesn't feel like my home.  I feel like a guest and I worry that at some point, I might look back and feel dissatisfied with my permanence.  Perhaps I move because I hope that eventually I will find home.  I will discover the place that is perfect.  It will be my place and feel as natural to me as the ground I walk on and sun that warms me.  Or maybe, like a game of musical chairs I will continue to circle and when the music stops I will find myself void a place to sit.  When that day comes, will there be anyone to catch me?


In life memories record our existence yet those same memories torture me.  The beautiful ones call to me yet when I seek them they vanish like a morning mist.  Perhaps in life there is no home.  If there was, it might signify permanence and in truth our existence is so temporal.  Still, like a foolish miner I will trek through the mountains.  I will cross river's and valleys and walk in circles and someday, just maybe, I will find my home.