Coming Home

The problem with traveling is the coming home.

My fellow victims of wanderlust, we must return home sometime. It can't be a coincidence that some of the world's most inveterate travelers are based in New York, a wonderful city whose housing facilities are usually less than commendable. As one gets older and accumulates more stuff, one notices that other people getting older with them are schlepping that stuff out of the city. Is it that the crowds have worn upon them? Or that they are just sick of moving everything around merely to unpack their suitcases. Maybe Hong Kong is full of addicted frequent flyers as well.

Home is where the heart is, or the heartbreak. We've been afflicted by construction issues in a new apartment. That makes for some very concrete housing pain. Unfortunately, some people probably need to avoid their families for one reason or another. I find the realities of "home" to be infected with tensions explored in many a Feminist academic polemic. Housework now saddens me, rather than enraging me with righteous fury. One must cook and clean, does it really need to be a political, demographical, anthropological struggle (in my head, mostly)? God is it endless, the cleaning I mean. And I even own a dishwasher. It would be nice to somehow enjoy it more, but it sure as hell doesn't pay much.

Home is also the place of bills, endless credit card offers even when you're on "that" list, advertisements for burial plots for Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Cooley (not sure who the second person is and why their mail comes here), grocery store coupons and take-out menus jammed in the doorway, forgotten coffee grinds, cords that somehow escape their pens and get into death matches with dust bunnies, leaks and the same view every single morning. Like the Little Prince I love to watch the sunset. At home, the sunset stars the same exact vine-covered telephone pole every single day. It's almost as bad as eating in most of small town America.

Even an American landscape dotted by drearily endless franchise signs at least changes as you venture through it. But home does not. Some people find this comforting. Why do I find it frightening?