Homeless At Home

I spent more than one-third of my life in the family home in the town where I grew up. For 19 years and change, I had the stability and familiarity of roots in the same patch of earth through the better part of my formative years. My siblings, all older than I, had been coming of age and leaving the nest slowly but surely, one at a time, throughout my childhood, scattering to nearby suburbs, still close to home, yet leaving me the lone bird. But, mere months after that 19th birthday, it was my turn to fly; I departed for adventures untold in valiant service to my country. And then, four years later, my Air Force career voluntarily cut short after the first contractual obligation, I moved back in with Mom and Dad. And my sister. And her kids. She had moved back home about a year before I left, pretty much the catalyst to my leaving in the first place. But there I was.

But I wasn't done adventuring; college, then a career in broadcasting that took me all over ...uh, two whole states. But always, I had that thin tether reminding me where home was.

And then love reeled me in and took me where? Home. Back to Chicago. Close to family once again.

But then things started changing, started falling apart. With Mom gone for some years, Dad finally sold the house, the home, my roots. What a strange feeling to see it there, nestled between the other homes I had grown up in-between, my home, but not my house, not any more. My boyhood home, the place where my biography starts. But now it's somebody else's home.


The boyhood home ...and the boy. And his sister, Marie,
far right, who passed away in 2014; and family friend,
Gloria, who moved to Florida a thousand years ago.


But that was okay. I still had Dad, and he was in the river house he had bought as a fixer-upper project that, once he had fixer-upped it, he and Mom had moved into. But then Mom was gone.

And then, though he had held up pretty well for a long while, Dad started falling apart, physically. He sold the river house, and another branch of my roots was severed.

And then he was gone, too.

Then my marriage withered and died. As a matter of convenience and economy, I moved to a town much closer to where I plied my trade, where I flexed my career muscles, where I buried my head in the sand of work, where pain and loss could be kept at bay.

And then the career left me. I found myself frantically treading water, working the only job I could find at the time, with a roof over my head, but no place that felt like home. None of my siblings lived in the town that had raised us any more. Sure, we were all scattered about the Chicago suburbs, but that one suburb that held all of my cherished memories was now devoid of all tangibles that were mine. I had nowhere to go to that I could call "back home."

I guess it happens to anyone who flies the coop and lives his life away. The wake one leaves eventually restores, and the stilled waters forget the rushing force that once cleaved them. Homes are sold, folks move on or pass on, and strangers occupy their void.

In the broader sense, Chicago is my "home," will always be my "home." Meet me in St. Louis and ask me what my hometown is. "Chicago," I'll say, because you've likely never heard of the puny suburb that actually calved me. But within that home town there's no place that holds me, no point in the earth to which I'm tethered. When I think about that, it makes me sad. The suburb where I live now is only where I live, now. I'm here only because I had to move out of the post-divorce apartment because I couldn't afford the rent any longer because my career quit me. My current apartment is my pad, but it's not my home.

I'm single. I'm unattached (again). Save for having just started a job where I once again have a track to retirement, I could live anywhere in this country I want to. But I can't think of any place I want to live. Chicagoland is the default because most of my surviving siblings are here, and I've lived in Chicagoland for all but 12 years of my life, and I'm here, now, so it's convenient. But where to live in Chicagoland — or outside of Chicagoland, for that matter? I couldn't decide if my life depended on it.

Ask me where I most want to live in the world. My answer?

Home.