Finding home

On a quiet street, a familiar greenway and getting comfortable after a lifetime of moving

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Every morning is the same. I sit on my porch drinking coffee and reading. The neighbor kid bolts out the door, hustles across his lawn and sprints to the bus stop, his backpack trailing behind him like a cape. Soon the school bus that boy is running to catch rumbles past my house, makes little to no attempt to obey the stop sign, then turns right.

Next, a man down the street pulls out of his driveway. I know it’s him before I see him because his tires drum across the tar lines in the concrete in a recognizable cadence—thump-thump, thump-thump. I never get a good look at his face because he’s always looking down at something – his phone, I bet.

For most of my life I would have rolled my eyes at such metronomic routine as mundane or boring. I am a journalist in large part because no two days are ever the same, because I routinely get to do different things in different places with different people.

But this morning routine doesn’t feel mundane or boring.

It feels comforting.

It feels like home.

And that’s something I haven’t had since I moved away to college 36 years ago.

I didn’t know I missed it until I found it again.

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When I moved to St. Louis in 2000, I was struck by how people talked to each other. Conversations had so many insider references that I felt like the only spouse at a high school reunion who didn’t go there. Locals used “we” more than anyplace I’ve ever been. We’ve got Forest Park and a free zoo, and we’re the best fans in baseball.

For years, I made fun of St. Louisans for being overbearingly self-referential, for their obsession with how the world sees them, and because their directions often included a line like, “turn left where the Kmart used to be,” which did me no good, because if I knew where the Kmart used to be, I wouldn’t need directions.

Underneath my mocking was jealousy. They had something—deep-rooted connection—that I lacked.

The world is increasingly splintered, disconnected, disinterested in community. But not here. Not in my neighborhood. Here, I wondered about the guy with a chest like a Buick when I didn’t see him for a few months.

I was relieved when I finally saw him striding toward me a few weeks ago.

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On weekends the pattern changes. I leave my house at 6:40 to run to the park for my F3 workout. I jog along the greenway, and as I cross a foot bridge, I see a man named Rich walking a beagle. I invite him to the workout. He says he’s too old. I say no you’re not, and all of that happens without me even breaking stride.

When I get to the park, Ray and Joyce and their two dogs are in the parking lot. When I first met them, Joyce taught me to remember their names by calling them “Ray-Joyce, like rejoice,” which fits because their smiles bring that word to life.

It’s funny how a silly little name like that worked in my heart.

It took me a long time to understand why.

But now I think I do.

For most of my time in St. Louis, I remained an outsider, an observer not a participant, a travel writer on permanent assignment. I never let myself feel at home out of fear of becoming attached only to move again—and for good reason. For the first 18 years of my life, I lived in one place. I have lived in 17 since then. I never gave myself a chance to get comfortable.

But now, with two teen-age daughters, roots growing stronger by the day and a bumper crop of deep friendships, I have found myself saying there are no circumstances under which I would move away.

I mean seriously, what would Buick Chest, Rich and Rejoice do without me?