HOME

The sun is high at six in the evening as the train pulls into South Bend. For the last half hour of the ride it has raced along the tracks, across the green fields and through the trees and the little hidden rivers. As the train turns into our city we all look out on it and at the setting sun as if we’ve never seen a Walgreens, never seen a Masonic Lodge, never seen a landing strip before. We are all filled with wonder and gladness to return home.
No matter how good the trip was, no matter how enjoyable the journey to friends or place may have been there is nothing like the journey home and the walk into one’s own house. There is no relaxation like that the body takes when the feet plant themselves on the floor and seem to reach, like plant roots into the ground and draw up strength from being in this place: home.
People who have never loved their home don’t understand. People who have never been rooted to a palce cannot know what this is like. To come home and say, “New York was nice, yes. But it wasn’t South Bend. To travel to Amsterdam and say, “Well, yes, there were plenty of museums and the canals were lovely. But you can’t get two packs of Marlboros for four dollars at the Speedway gas station.”
Americans are addicted to rootlessness and in love with places they don’t belong. We are supposed to like our big cities and our individual lives and run from our families and the places that sustain us. But two days from Chicago were two days I couldn’t see the sky, and felt disconnected from the land. The neighborhoods on the North End now aren’t like the old neighborhoods, or like my neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else and everyone’s sister and mother and grandmother, where everyone is tangled together in invisible webs. Here, in my city there are buses and trains and cabs but courtesy is not simply a formality. You WILL see this cab driver again. So you’d better behave. This bus driver is your girlfriend’s cousin. So you are connected. Everything is related to everything. The woman at the cigarette shop with not charge you for what you bought today because she likes you. The librarians will wave your fines. If you ask a waitress for free dessert she will think about it a moment, and then come out with one. Money is not quite as powerful as sheer decency. On the busy streets of down town lawyers wave to you, the trolley drivers lean out their windows and shout to you. You must give to the bums because, yes… they know you. You are wholly responsible, wholly cared for, wholly a part of this city and, therefore… whole.