No Place Like Home
I’ve been a lot of places. Some of them were wonderful, scintillating, beautiful, even stunning. Some of them less so. None of them, however, ever felt like home. And this chronic feeling of rootlessness is strange, given that I come from Colonial era families on both parents’ sides. I'm many generations removed from the push West, and myself have straddled the four corners of the continent, always searching, never finding. Where did I truly belong, and what would there be about such a place that would make me feel at home there? Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, clicked her ruby heels and whispered, “There’s no place like home.” For her, that black and white farm in Kansas was where she belonged. Good for her. But I never felt that way anywhere, from the very beginning. Maybe being a Jersey Boy had something to do with it. Jersey was always a place to leave, not go back to. But Springsteen did fine with that locale and identity. So did Malcolm Forbes, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Frank S...