Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about me and the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 12: “Moving Home.”
I know people who always consider their birthplace as home, and routinely refer to it in that way. It doesn’t matter where they’ve travelled to and lived, the place where they were born—the province, the state, the city—is and will always be home to them. I’m not like that and so sometimes in conversation with them, I’ve been momentarily confused when, say, they have been living in the same city I’ve been in for the past ten years, and they refer to going home now and then, when the first thing my brain processes is, You’re already home.
It’s a very common thing among Newfoundlanders, for whom the whole trajectory and plan for their lives is to work and live a life elsewhere for practical purposes like the availability of jobs, but always dreaming and longing for retirement when they can finally come home, like a reward, or like the logical closure to the flitting about they have done for the forty years in the middle of their life. Twenty years of youth, forty years of work, and then twenty years (or more, hopefully) of relaxing. The perfect life.
The province itself is on board with the sentiment. 2022 was declared a Come Home Year, featuring among other things an advertising campaign to tempt wayward Newfies back to where they were born. There was also a specialty car license plate, featuring a whale tail and the words COME HOME, which are common on the roads here in St. John’s (see the show notes for a photo). They echo the big and famous Come Home Year in Newfoundland that happened in 1966, again also featuring a special license plate.
I am four months away from being 65 and though it might seem like I am following the pattern of the Newfoundlander coming back home, I’m really not at all. Excluding short-lived excursions here and there, I’ve moved to a different city nine times in my life, between 1978 and 2023. That’s about once every five years. I’ve lived in some cities more than once (Toronto, Ottawa). I’ve lived in one for just a year (London, Ontario). And I’ve lived outside of Canada once (Boston for five years). And now this also is my second time living in St. John’s, where I completed the last three years of my bachelor’s degree during 1978–1981 and returned here only last November, after about forty-two years.
My reasons for moving had nothing to do with the homecoming nostalgia of many Newfoundlanders. It was a combination of practicality and family connection. I was living in Ottawa and couldn’t help but notice that real estate prices were soaring crazily. It turned out that my large (for Ottawa) condo had almost doubled in value in four years. I was also slightly house poor from the high mortgage rate and the substantial condo fee (over $900 monthly), and so I saw an opportunity that fit in well with my other reason for moving: to be closer to family. I quickly decided to put it on the market, a bidding war ensued, and I sold it for more than $50,000 over the asking price on the first day. All was good.
It turns out that I do in fact genuinely love St. John’s, but I’ve felt like that for several of the cities I’ve lived in. Maybe I’m just, so to speak, promiscuous in that regard. I’ve heard people talk about the one place on earth, their birthplace or not, being the place that resonates with them, speaks to their soul, where they feel most comfortable and at peace. I don’t have that kind of specificity in me, and when I ponder the reasons for that I come up with some explanations.
I don’t have a brain (or a heart) that operates in absolutes. I don’t see one way of life as the one best for me, just as if I may be in love with someone, I don’t imagine that this is absolutely the only person for me and that if she dies I am consigned to a life of romantic bereavement till I die myself. I’m also restless, which is a good and a bad thing, depending on how you or I view it. I’ve always remembered the line from the TV series Mad Men, where one of Don’s many tryst women says to him after he has said he’s finished with her: “You only like the beginnings of things.” Not a flattering comparison to me perhaps, and for the record I have had many fewer trysts than Don did during the series, but to put it more prosaically, I get tired of things. This is partly due to ambition and partly due to a low tolerance for life turning into a kind of assembly line where it seems like I’m just doing the same old things all the time.
Change beckons and I like big change. It feels like an injection of novelty and possibility, where I get to see how I can fare in this new environment, what new experiences it can bring me, what new people I could meet, perhaps what romantic partner I could discover. And lots more, including, very importantly, just the experience of difference, just seeing how things are done differently here than where I used to be, how life overall is different in the new place. In some cases, admittedly, my moves have had some proportion of escape in them as well. I was tired of a job or stuck without friends, for example.
The eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson warned against depending too much on mere moving to a new place as the panacea for your unhappiness in your current one: “THE general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is a change of place; they are always willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene of diversion, and always returning home with disappointment and complaints.” I understand what he’s referring to but my moves have always had a greater proportion of going somewhere about them rather than leaving somewhere else.
So for me, in the end, it’s a puzzle about what place to call home. Is home the place where I was born, the place where I’ve lived your life, a place that I love, or a place that I never really find?
And that’s all for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And please join me again next Tuesday. ▬
SHOW NOTES ▬
Is home the place where you were born, the place where you’ve lived your life, a place that you love, or a place you never really find? ▬
Sources:
→ “ Government Unveils New Provincial Licence Plate for Come Home Year,” VOCM 16 Nov. 2021, https://vocm.com/2021/11/16/government-unveils-new-provincial-licence-plate-for-come-home-year/
→ Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, number 6, 7 Apr. 1750, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, pp. 46–47, University of Michigan Digital Collections, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/004772607.0001.001
→ “Tomorrow Land,” Mad Men, created by Matthew Weiner, season 4, episode 13, Lionsgate Television, 17 Oct. 2010. ▬
