Returning Home, and the Continuing Search to Belong

Written January 2007.
I have been warned that this sounds bitter. Truly, I do not mean it to. Maybe just a little tired, but amused.

The 10 Year High School Reunion. What pain, what strong emotions this concept brings. We are 28, 29 years old, supposedly adults with careers and family, well into the promising future indicated by our graduating dreams from ten years ago. The moment of potential should be realized - we should know now who we are, why we are here, what our contribution will be. But, at the same time, names not thought about in years start to resurface, and with them the insecurities. Of belonging – in high school, in a culture, in a city. Charleston is a difficult city to have as a birthplace. As desirable as she is with all her charms, she can be rather coy, and selective as to who she allows into her family.

So the questions remain - if the same girl who got the lead part in the first grade play got the lead role in the Senior Play, why should I think that after another ten years we are really all that different? And if I had so little in common with these people and this city ten years ago, why should ten years apart – and ten years away – mean we are more to each other now?

However, the truth of the matter is, as much of a gray sheep as I felt myself to be throughout most of my twelve years of school, my classmates have known me – well or not – longer than anyone else outside of my family. In my high school graduating class of some 70-odd people, about a third of us had been classmates since first grade. And while I haven’t lived in Charleston since I graduated, it is the closest thing I have to a home. Yet without a family history in the Lowcountry, I can never consider myself a true local. Yes, these days, I hear that the times are changing and with all the Yankees coming in I can more confidently claim my Charleston birthright. Yet how seriously can I take this statement when everyone who can, lists their Charleston pedigree with bios stating that they are “native Charlestonians” of anywhere from five to eleven generations?

For, alas, I was only born there. And my lifelong instinct to blend in, wherever I am, has meant that my accent, which didn’t broadcast me as out-of-place when I lived there, now is straight neutral – from “The West,” as defined by an online quiz; or “Yankee,” when I return home. I visited Charleston a few years back with my boyfriend at the time, and was craving a patty melt at the John’s Island Café. It was everything I hoped for and after I licked my plate clean, our waitress cooed to us in her thick Southern accent, “So, y’all like it here? Where’re y’all from?”

“Actually,” I said patiently, used to this line of questioning, “I was born here, but I’m living in New York now.”

“Really?” she drawled. “I grew up in Connecticut, but I’ve lived here three years.”

Sigh…

I’m tired of being treated like a tourist in my own home town. From an extra thick layer of solicitous ooze from people in the hospitality industry, to patronizing comments about the pace of life in the South versus the North when people see the Pennsylvania license tags on my rental car, I am weary of being the “other.” I know about these things – my best friend from high school always loved to play the role of “the Southerner” for the tourists. She thought it was a game. She’d walk around barefoot and in overalls (okay, this was normal), but be extra-friendly and attentive to visitors and then giggle about their accents as they tried to respond to her Southern charm.

It is on this experience that I blame my vagabond ways. Since I started college, I haven’t kept the same mailing address for over twelve months. Each summer I spent in a different place. After college, I moved briefly overseas, and then to New York City, when you can be considered a New Yorker as soon as you can make sense of the subway – a process that can take as little as a few weeks. In three years, I lived in three apartments. I was invited into the City’s outer circle, but I couldn’t afford to stay. Upon leaving New York, I found a lifestyle that allowed me to indulge my itinerant lifestyle, and haven’t since lived in once place longer than four months. I worked in environments where a typical question was, “So, where is your storage shed?” I am sometimes convinced that the reason I am with my current boyfriend is because he is more homeless than I am – he was born in Germany, moved to Mississippi at age five, Kansas some years later, back to Germany after high school, and has been transient ever since.

I am looking for a place that feels like home. I am looking for many things, but this is where I seem to want to start. But home is more than just walking down the street and admiring the architecture, or even knowing that you have family nearby. It’s knowing where to look for the perfect gift, where to find the best Chinese food, the color of the air when it is yellow-green under the trees after a spring rainstorm, the way a piece of paper melts when you step outside into May humidity.

I know if I moved back to Charleston it would be as unfamiliar as moving to a place I had read much about but never visited. As steeped as she is in history, Charleston stays alive because she changes, for both good and bad. I visited recently, this past New Years, barely a week after my high school reunion. I didn’t intentionally miss my reunion, but the timing was off, and I was afraid of attaching too much significance to a event renowned for being uncomfortable. So, I visited my best friend, and her two year old baby I hadn’t seen and her house and her husband, and thought about how different we were and how little we have in common. And how, despite all that, she knows me better than anyone I have known before or since. And how, despite all the traveling, or perhaps because of it, and despite how pale I am, and the fact that I have forgotten how to say y’all, and that I would be clueless to suggest a place to go for a drink, if I were to move back to Charleston, I would still be welcomed home. And while I might not necessarily choose to do so, it is still a comforting thing to believe.