Home

Every year, the department in which I teach holds an "open house." In it, refreshments are served (the biggest draw of all--but don't tell anybody I said that!), faculty members plug the elective courses they're teaching and make some attempt to entice students to major in English instead of, say, accounting or physical therapy. It's an easy sell: After all, wouldn't you rather study something for which you need an advanced degree in order to have any hope of meaningful employment ( for which you might have to go to some third-rate technical college in Oklahoma or some such place) instead of something in which you can get a starting salary roughly equal to mine with just a bachelor's degree? Of course you would!

All right. I won't be sarcastic anymore. I actually like the open house, my aversion to the politics of the department and college notwithstanding, because I do get to chat with people I wish I could see more often. And, I get to read a poem or two aloud. Not my own, but that's all right: I take pleasure in relaying a piece of writing I love, however imperfectly I may do that.

In each year's open house, there's a theme for the readings. Last year, it was "social justice," for which I read two selections from The Spoon River Anthology. This year's theme is "home."

I've looked at a few poems and a selection of prose. Since each of us is limited to three or four minutes, I can't read them all. Each one of them feels as fresh as it did to me the first time I read it, which is always a good sign. However, I do find myself having a response I had never before anticipated.

I realize now that, oddly, the concept of "home" has always been rather abstract for me. Or, at least, I don't relate to it in the same way as other people might.

Now, I can say that I come from a relatively stable family. At times, I've wished that my father had been more present, at least emotionally, than he was. He has expressed that same wish in recent years. I tell him to forget about the past; now is the time to be the kind of grandfather, father and husband he wishes he had been. Mom and I agree that he's "gotten better." Even when my relationship with him was at its most strained, I respected him for one thing: He treated my maternal grandmother well. She always said as much; so does Mom.

At least Mom was always available in any way you define that word. For a few weeks before my surgery, and until I returned to work, I talked to her every day, sometimes more than once. When I was living in Paris--in the days before the Internet and cheap calling plans--we talked and wrote to each other every week. And through my life, I've talked with her about one situation or another I've faced. She may not know the particulars, but she knows my emotional makeup. Not very many other people could understand it.

So why am I talking about my parents, again? Well, really, when I think of "home," at least as I knew it early in my life, what else was there, really? I've forgotten most of the objects we did and didn't have in the places where we lived, none of which was as wonderful or terrible as I thought they were.

What I do remember are the some physical spaces and sensations: the almost warrenlike rooms of the apartment in which we lived in Brooklyn, the narrow stairs that led from the brick front porch to the door that opened into the wide dining room and kitchen of the house to which we moved, just a few blocks away from the apartment, and the strangely raspy grass that surrounded the house in which we lived next, in New Jersey. Those might be the memories of a home, but they are not home, or even pieces of it.

After leaving my parents, home became wherever I happened to lay my head that night. Although, looking back, I realize that I got a pretty good education at Rutgers, it is the time in my life I would least like to repeat. Even when I had stimulating classes or met interesting people, I felt as out of place as I did in a locker room or military barracks.

For a time, I felt as if I "belonged" in Paris, although I never could have claimed it as my home. That's still a stronger connection than I would feel to any neighborhood--and any dwelling--in which I'd live for the next two decades or so. It didn't matter how "good" the neighborhood or "nice" my apartment was: I simply never felt I could claim it as my home.

When you feel like an alien in your own body, what could possibly feel like home?

It's no surprise to me now that the block on which I now live has become a home. Millie, John and Tami adopted me, if you will. My place isn't the most elegant, and some parts of this neighborhood, which was largely industrial until recently, are rather ugly. But they've grown on me. At least the parks, the river and the Noguchi Museum are within a one-block radius of my apartment. And even more important are the people and the fact that I can now inhabit my self.

Yes, it's wonderful to come home. Now to choose which version of it to read at the open house. I have another week, I think, to do that.

How Not To Get Lost

Today is Columbus Day. Some people had the day off from work, and kids from school--to celebrate a guy who got lost.

At least, if any man had an excuse for not asking for directions, it was Signor Colombo. I mean, whom could he have asked? Dolphins? Sharks? Seagulls?

You see, if there really is a master or creator, Columbus would've been wandering the ocean for forty years. And Moses would've made it to Israel in, what, a few weeks?

OK, now I've probably offended half of the Western world, and a good part of whatever readership I had. What'll I do now?

I can understand how difficult it must have been for Chris. After all, I've been in countries that spoke languages I didn't. And, as I like to tell people, I'm a direct descendant of Columbus and inherited his navigational skills!

All right, I'll admit: I have no connection to the one who "discovered" the "new" world--at least, none that I know of, anyway.

How could anyone say he "discovered" a place in which millions of people were already living meaningful and useful lives? In fact, I'd say that through most of the first millenium and a half, they were more civilized--in almost any way one defines that term--than the part of the world whence Columbus sailed.

And how could anyone say that what he found was the "new" world. Now, I know nothing about geological history, but I'd hazard a guess that the "new" world must be as old as the "old" world simply because they share the same planet.

Maybe I should become a geological historian. Then maybe I would stop whining about how old I'm becoming or have become.

So let's see--to become a geological historian, I'd have to take most of an undergraduate curriculum, as I never took a geology course and not a whole lot of science. Then I'd have to get a master's and a PhD. By that time, I'll be old enough that my professors will be studying me!

All to do what prisoners do: break rocks!

This day, at least here in New York, is a sort of Italian pride day. Isn't it strange that we come from a culture that gave the world Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dante, Petrarch, Bocaccio, St.Francis of Assisi, Galileo, Verdi, Vivaldi and Eleonore Duse--and we're supposed to feel pride in some guy who didn't know he landed somewhere near Port au Prince when he was trying to get to India?

At least Petrarch could make the quatrains run on time!

Anyway...I'm thinking now about Lindy, who had an orchiotomy a few days after I had my surgery. She hopes to have the full genital reassignment surgery in a few years, when she can afford it. But she needed that orchiotomy to save her life: Her male genitalia sealed off what turned out to be ovaries and a birth canal that were turning gangrenous and destroying her liver and kidneys. She confirmed what I'd suspected: that she and her wife spent all but their last dollar, literally, to get the orchiotomy. But I have no doubt that one day she'll have the surgery: she and her wife are committed to it, and to each other.

During our conversation, she quoted Oscar Wilde, articles from the New England Journal of Medicine and almost anything you can think of in between. She wasn't trying to impress me: She couldn't, because I was already in awe of her. Rather, those texts she quoted were as necessary to her survival as the air.

After talking with her, I realized why I didn't enjoy that course I took last spring, and why I don't think I'll take any more PhD-level courses in English--or, most likely, any more English courses at all. In fact, it helped me to realize why, as much as I love literature, writing and teaching, I can't stand most English departments--and, for that matter, much of Education with a capital "E." It also underscored why I won't ever go near Gender Studies, or any supposedly-intellectual endeavor with the word "gender" in its title, ever again.

Lindy wasn't trying to one-up me or anyone else by quoting what she read. She wasn't even trying to win an argument, if for no other reason that she has no reason to argue with me (at least not yet, anyway!). Rather, she was using those texts, which had been her guides, to better understand her own situation and to relate it to me.

In other words, she wasn't using those texts as ego-gratification in the guise of intellectual inquiry. Instead, she was using them to help her amplify some very hard-won truths. (If you want to get an idea of just how hard-won they are, check out this entry--and my comment--on Staci Lana's blog: http://www.femulate.org/2009/10/gender-on-my-mind.html)

When a person does what Lindy did in our conversation, there's simply no way he or she can condescend to anyone else. And there's certainly no need to do that after you've found your own truths rather than what merely gives you status. If nothing else, you understand that winning an argument--whatever that means--is nothing more, or less, than that: winning the argument doesn't mean that you're right.

Really, the only victories are in discovering the truth--one's own and that of the world. After that, the other "victories" are just so much ego gratification. If that's not a recipe for getting lost, I don't know what is.

At least Christopher Columbus had an excuse for getting lost!