Where Is Home? What Is the Place You Love?

I'm not attached to any one place, but I am attached to my friends

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about me and the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 27: “Where Is Home? What Is the Place You Love?”

There’s an old Newfie joke about a Newfie who is tired of living in Toronto and so he goes to buy a cheap used car so that he can move back to Newfoundland. The salesman says he has one, but tells him that the reverse gear doesn’t work in it.

“Dass OK,” the Newfie says, “I’ne not comin back anyway.”

I know people not only from Newfoundland but from some other province where they were born and where many of their family members still reside, who always consider the place of their birth their home and continue to refer to it that way. They’ve lived in Ottawa, say, for thirty years, but when they talk about taking a vacation to see family, they always say they are “going home for a visit.” I’ve also known people who were born in one place and have moved to another place to work, but have yet another place somewhere in the world that they feel resonates with their spirit.

I’m not sure how much of an outlier I am in this regard, but I’ve never felt either of these. When I lived in Boston for five years, that was my home. So was Toronto when I have lived there several different times during my life. And so was Ottawa when I lived there for two long stretches that add up in years now to longer than I’ve ever lived in my home province. Home for me is where I am right now.

As for the other situation, where you happen to visit a place that stirs something in you, the only time that’s come close to happening is when I was living, I think, in Ottawa and happened to visit my family in Newfoundland, and we took a trip to a small town called Trinity, about three hours north and west of the capital city of St. John’s. The feeling has since dissipated—though I wonder if it would revive if I paid another visit—but I remember feeling like this was the place for me. I can’t put it any more accurately than that. I wanted to buy the Catholic Church which was then unused there and convert it into a beautiful open-concept house. (Also, the atheist in me liked the idea of buying real estate from God.)

Everything means something and often any way you react to one phenomenon in life is analogous to how you would react to something else. Yes, that’s a mouthful. What I mean is that if I feel this way about places (the one I’m in is the one for me) then I may likely feel the same way about other things in life. Nothing is special, so to speak. There’s no one and only soulmate. There’s no one thing or place or event or whatever that the universe is guiding me towards. I happen to believe strongly that there is no conscious order in the universe. I don’t know where it all came from but I certainly don’t believe that God or any other supernatural force is pointing me somewhere. I don’t believe, as I’ve heard many people say, that things happen for a reason. That implies and assumes a guiding entity that I simply cannot bring myself to believe exists.

Another reason why I or anyone else might not feel that strong love for the place of their birth, and a compelling urge to move back (say, after retirement), is that their days and years growing up there were not that pleasant. There could of course be myriad reasons for that. Absent parents. Abusive parents. Not being accepted by your peers. Wanting something (and some place) bigger. And on and on. In my own case, I led a fairly happy childhood, raised by a single mother. I did well in school and though we as a family didn’t have much money, I never really lacked for anything. My father was still in our life in the sense of making occasional visits, but though my brother and I didn’t know it at the time, he was erratic in his child-support payments. Months would go by and he likely had the $250 per month from his construction work, but he just didn’t send it. My mother made a meagre wage working mostly as a waitress at Woolworth’s, so that money was important to her.

But as children, this wasn’t really something we noticed or worried about. Perhaps the biggest gap in my life was that I really didn’t have any friends the older I got. There was Mike next door when I was less than ten, but as I became an older adolescent, I became more reclusive. I didn’t socialize with the boys my age and I certainly didn’t ever have a girlfriend. I didn’t go to my high-school graduation. I think all this affected me pretty profoundly. I ended up spending too much time with my mother and being semi-responsible for the oversight of my two brothers, and kind of missed experiencing a typical boyhood.

I left my home town, Corner Brook, in the fall of 1981 to attend graduate school at the University of Toronto. That was an intimidating experience for me, but, as usual back then, I tended to contain my feelings and emotions, and simply powered through. I liked Toronto, too, but, again, it didn’t become a locus drawing me back, didn’t become a place that I “fell in love with,” as some people say of their relationships with the various cities they live in. I was very self-enclosed back then (I would have been in my early and mid-20s) and tended to feel apart from everyone and everything, never a part of a group, never an inhabitant of a place that suited me.

Forty years later, I’ve changed a lot since then and I am happy and secure in the person I am. As you know if you’ve listened to some of the other episodes of this podcast, I don’t hate myself anymore and in fact I routinely and directly defend myself—my self—against the casual or intentional attacks that people of all sorts naturally lob at me. I now live in the province though not the city I was born in, and, yes, this now feels like home to me. I’ve been here a year. I think there are two ways to look at this, let me call it facetiously, geographical promiscuity of mine, and also at what it says about my character in general.

On the one hand, I don’t form bonds with anything, and possibly with anyone, that are permanent. Nothing cannot be cancelled, cut off, given up, ended summarily. Nothing overwhelms me to the extent that my senses overrule my brain or that at some point I will just walk away from it.

On the other hand, I am independent. The place where I am is the place where I want to be, or at least is the place that I accept for now and try to derive the most life, the most lived experience, from. The same thing applies to people. One of the greatest things I have in my life, me, the guy who spent his adolescence and young adulthood alone and didn’t get laid for the first time until I was 24—one of the greatest things I have is four excellent friends whose lives I am interested in and involved in to varying extents. They are interested in what happens to me and I am interested in what happens to them. Some people have nobody like that and either have given up searching, or are somehow satisfied with just companionship based on fun activities and the like. Other people with even just one close friend know what I am talking about.

And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. And please join me again next Tuesday.