"Home? What is this 'home' you speak of, my Russian brother?"

A meditation on a sense of place, or the lack thereof

This was inspired (because provoked has connotations I don’t want to imply here) by M.D.C. Bowen’s “An American Sense Of Place”, which you really ought to read because it’s a fine piece of writing with which I mostly agree, and because it’ll give you a better sense of where I’m coming from. I advert to you that I am not looking for sympathy; it’s just that this is something that’s been on my mind for a long time, and while parts of it came up in The Last Falangist and What Did You Do In The Cold War, Dad? I haven’t tried to pull it all together in one place.

Quoting yourself is bad form, I suppose, but the above was my gut reaction to Mike’s essay. It was something I said long ago to a Russian ally in EVE-Online, back when I was a member of Goonfleet in the dark days when everybody hated us…and everybody hated the Russians, too, so we were natural allies. Context is important, though, so let’s start at the beginning.

I was born in Brunswick, Maine, but when I was still a baby my father was reassigned to Fort Ethan Allen, Hancock AFB, and finally Elmendorf AFB in Alaska, where Mom and I weren’t allowed to join him for a year and had to stay with her family in Santa Fe. I remember nothing about any of those places, so they aren’t home. We were only in Alaska for three years before Dad was reassigned to Tyndall AFB in Florida, where my brother was born, and after a year and a half there Dad was transferred to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. We settled in a house a few minutes’ walk from the DC line in Maryland, and that’s pretty much where I grew up. That was home for a while. I grew up, bombed out of community college and joined the Army; failed out of that, too, and came home. After about a year I met my wife at a science fiction convention in Baltimore, and a few months later married her and moved to Minneapolis.

We moved from a shared house to an upstairs apartment in a duplex and finally into our own house, and that was home for a while until the divorce broke up the family; a few years after the divorce, a major drain broke and I couldn’t afford to fix it, so I sold the house and spent a few years with my daughter in the suburbs before she grew up and moved out. Those apartments weren’t home, and neither was the apartment in Alexandria, and the bedroom I lived in for a couple of years in Springfield certainly wasn’t.

I eventually moved out to Las Vegas, got sick, got evicted, lived in a homeless veterans barracks for most of a year, and wound up in Tonopah, where barring some bizarre twist of fate, I fully expect to die. Despite what it says on the license plate, though, Nevada is not home. It’s just where I live.

I’m not unique. A lot of service brats and other Third Culture Kids have the same problem of never quite feeling at home anywhere, of being “On the outside/Looking in”, as that James McMurtry song says. We’d like to belong somewhere, but after bouncing around so long, we get the feeling that we’ve been too long in the wasteland. It’ll close some doors. Maybe that’s why I’m so determined to make Son of Silvercon, my science fiction convention in Las Vegas, succeed. At least for a few days a year, hanging out with my fellow Wrongfans having Wrongfun, I can lose the thousand-yard stare and feel like I’m somewhere that kind of, sort of, feels something like home.

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