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 Sinatra, Count Basie, Thomas Edison, and Einstein.

Me, I never fit in anywhere (other than the superficial niceties and necessaries for survival), even from the beginning, and had to keep moving. But what feeling or thing was it I was so desperately yearning for, searching for my whole life?

Even the word 'home' itself is a misnomer. When that National Board of Realtors announces the “sales of new homes” figures for last month, they are talking about buildings. I am talking about a sense of place. A place where I feel I belong. I have been all over Planet Earth in this search, and with all that travel why did nowhere ever every feel like home?

Odysseus’s journey home only took a few years. Mine, still ongoing, has taken fifty years and I’m still looking. Does that make me a footloose drifter? Even a homeless person? In a way. Yet I’ve owned lots of buildings, and parts thereof, and own a condominium now, where I presently live with my family. It’s very nice. But once again, it’s not home. It’s just the place where I live. Some of the ‘homes’ I’ve owned or lived in were very upscale—luxurious, even. These ranged from a spring Street loft to a Murray Hill penthouse in NY, to a hillside Spanish chalet in Sherman Oaks, California, to a luxury ranch in Ojai, to an adobe chalet in Santa Fe to a golfside bungalow in St. Pete. All were quite nice. But none of them were home.

Why not? What was missing, from the time of my childhood? And if others feel this way as much as I do, what does this say about our history, and culture, and people? Have we become a nation of drifters?

(Excerpt from Gene Ayres' forthcoming memoir: On the Road Again 2010)