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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 This summer, I am working in New York City at a finance magazine. I research and write about billionaires, people who have homes across the country and around the world. Some of these people jet from house to house, with or without their families. My research has caused me to wonder: If all the money in the world can buy you a penthouse in Manhattan, a ranch in Colorado, and a beachfront villa in Palm Beach, can all of these places be home? I was reluctant to move to New York, mostly because it felt cold and unfriendly when I visited in January. But after three weeks here, I already feel it growing on me. “See, before you know it,” one of my fellow interns told me, “New York is going to be your home away from home.” His use of the phrase startled me. “Home away from home” implies that there is some place that reigns first in our consciousness, some primary establishment that wins out in the home hierarchy, and that every place we come to call home after that original abode is only second, or third—and so on to infinity—compared to it. I assured him that Illinois was my home, and Harvard was my home away from home. He asked what New York was. And it hit me: It was my home away from home away from home. If Harvard is my home away from home, then I am scared to see what happens when I am forced to move on. If the place I am supposed to call home no longer feels like home, and every other place is my home away from there, then maybe it’s true: you can’t go home again. As students in the global age, we are encouraged to travel, to explore, to plant roots and sow seeds and make connections wherever we land. But the idea that we can have homes away from homes away from homes by the time we’re 20 is terrifying. How many degrees of separation can we put between ourselves and our places of origin before our concept of home becomes so diluted that no place is ever really home, but at most a fraction? Last week, my best friend from high school came to visit New York. She still lives in our hometown. I was telling her about how it felt to be midway through college and what I wanted from the next few years of my life: to keep working in New York through this summer, to spend next summer researching in Africa, and to become a journalist in New York after graduation. She leaned across the table and said, “You’re never coming home again.” Sometimes I wonder if it bothers me more that I am drifting away from my home, or that my home is drifting away from me. As hard as it was to imagine myself without my home before I left for college, it was even harder to imagine my home continuing to exist without my presence there. The typical narcissism of a teenager barely fades when we get to college: visiting my freshman-year dorm room as a sophomore, I couldn’t help but fume silently at the four current occupants for intruding on my life. That must have been the way those members of the class of 1977 felt as I led them around Harvard Yard, showing them the places they used to live, telling them about the myriad ways in which my school was now differ ent from theirs. Had I been those men following me around the paths they had walked on a decade before I was born, I might have asked myself what on earth this little girl was doing, giving me a tour of my own house. I chose to go straight from Harvard to New York this summer without spending time in Illinois. Although this was my own decision—and something I was ultimately happy about—I was jealous when my cousin Rachel visited my parents, went to “my” movie theater, shopped at “my” mall, slept in my bed. When my mom confided that she had let Rachel “take a few things she liked” from my closet, I snapped. The idea that another five-foot, three-inch, 20-year-old bru nette who shared half of my relatives might actually replace me was crushing. Selfishly, I thought home was supposed to be waiting for me whenever I wanted it: never did it occur to me that things might change if I weren’t there. My experience with the class of 1977 marked the halfway point of my time at Harvard. And however comfortable I feel most of the time, there are still days when I feel as though I have just arrived and, frankly, just want to go home. As I wandered around campus early in June writing about graduation, it was hard to ignore the fact that the grins of the class of 2007 often masked apprehension and fears about the future. What are they scared of? What am I scared of? I’m scared that I’ll end up alone in a big city, feeling as if I’m stuck somewhere in between the places I’ve lived. I’m scared that I’ll get back to Illinois and not recognize the person sleeping in my bed, that I’ll go back to Harvard and not recognize the people writing for the Crimson, or the mascot of Winthrop House. I wish I had answers to some of the questions I’m asking. But I know that I’m already nostalgic for things I still have, and to be a 20-year-old yearning for the good ol’ days may be unhealthy, if not downright twisted. More important than the physical places I’ve lived will be the people and moments I take home (away from home away from home) with me. In “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” Bob Dylan sings, “What kind of house is this…where I have come to roam?” He answers himself, reassuring the scores of young college students nostalgic for music from before their time: “‘It’s not a house,’ said Judas Priest, ‘It’s not a house, it’s a home.’” Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow Emma Lind ’09 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. She guesses that there are about a thousand squirrels at Harvard.  
 
 
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