“Welcome home, Sir,” says the passport control officer at O’Hare after a cursory shuffle through my passport. I haven’t lived in the U.S. for nearly 18 years, but it’s still nice to be welcomed home, even if I’m not exactly sure where home is. I’ve been through many border stations, and to the best of my knowledge no other nation’s border control authority gives this kind of greeting to returning nationals.
– As a professional expat, home has a dual meaning for me. There is the “home” where you hang your hat and park your belongings. It is the physical space you “come home to” after a week or two of living in hotels, the place where domestic life unspools its familiar routines and unexpected dramas. Then there is the “home” that is the place where you are from, the place whose linguistic accents you cannot erase from your tongue, whose customs and conventions you carry around in your DNA. It is home even when you do not live there.
When our family first went abroad, friends who knew about such matters had some advice. They told us to take as much of our personal stuff, especially home furnishings, as we could manage. The idea is that if you surround yourself with the familiar, it makes the foreign feel a little less foreign, a little more like home. It proved to be good counsel. Over the next two decades, we lived in some memorable homes, from an old stone house on the Bethlehem Road in Jerusalem to a crumbling, leaky, unbelievably expensive-to-heat manor in Surrey, outside London. There was a fantastically ugly but impressively practical duplex in Warsaw and a spacious apartment with a terrace that offered a glimpse of the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome. In all, we lived in seven different homes during our years abroad. My wife, Kathy, had an uncanny ability to turn all of them into our “home” — usually within 48 hours. And for the most part it was a home without the burdens of homeownership. When the refrigerator in Warsaw gave up the ghost, it wasn’t our refrigerator, it was the Tribune’s.
Still, there was a transient feel to our existence, and Kathy and I constantly told each other and our two daughters that someday we would own a home, and that would be our real home. As proof of our commitment to this idealized “real home,” we spent a lot of time shopping for it. In Venice, we bought a fancy glass chandelier for the dining room we imagined; my travels in the Middle East produced a surplus of carpets; between Italy and Eastern Europe, we outfitted our future kitchen with about four sets of tableware.
The other concept of home is more abstract, but also more fixed. As much as we loved living in Italy, you cannot call it home unless you can honestly call yourself Italian. Our Roman neighbors were friendly enough, but for Italians family always comes first and virtually all social activities are built around the family. London, the last place we lived, is the most like America. The city is full of people from someplace else. Londoners will allow you to call their city home even if you are not British. But it never quite felt like home to me, even after I got the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road.
When we flew back to Chicago earlier this year, we weren’t sure how we would feel. Although we had visited regularly over the years, we had never actually lived here.
The first order of business was to buy a home. We ended up in a two-bedroom condo in the city. It’s in a nice old building, but the Venetian chandelier doesn’t really fit. Nor does the antique carousel pony I bought on a whim in Istanbul. And what were we thinking with more than 30 rugs? Half of them are rolled up and stored under beds. It has taken us much longer than normal to settle into this home, but that is probably because we know this one is ours. We know that when the refrigerator breaks down, the problem is ours, not the Tribune’s. Ah, home at last.
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thundley@tribune.com
