Home is where the dog is

When I was in college, a year or 2 before I got Lucy, the movie Garden State was released.  I loved this movie for so many reasons, but mostly because I really connected with Zach Braff’s character.  A lot of the things he said resonated with me and I felt as though he was able to articulate much of what I was feeling at the time, but couldn’t quite put into words.  One particular line stuck with me:

“You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone...you'll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know.”  

           

            I didn’t know I was feeling that feeling until Zach Braff said it, but as soon as I heard it, things clicked in my mind.  This fictional person on this screen had just articulated for me why I was feeling a certain loss, missing something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.  I visited my family a lot during this time (they were a cheap 45 minute Jet Blue flight or a 5.5 hour car ride away), but whenever I went home something was missing there too.  It didn’t feel quite right.  And here, on this movie screen, it suddenly made sense.  I was going through that transition in life—my parents’ home was no longer my own.  Of course I still felt at home when I was there, but I didn’t live there anymore.  I didn’t even have a room there.  I had become a guest in my parents’ house.  And I didn’t know where my home was.

            “Home” has always been a difficult concept for me.  We moved around quite a bit when I was younger.  I was born in Kentucky and lived on a tiny farm there until I was 4.  Then we moved to Richmond, Virginia where I became a swimmer, spending every moment of every summer at the pool.  In many ways, I have more memories of that pool than I do of our Virginia home.  When I was 12 we moved up to my parents house in Rochester, NY where they still live.  I remember when I went to college, the first time someone asked me where I was from, I didn’t know what to say.  Do I tell them all the places I’m from, or just the most relevant?  And what’s the most relevant?  Rochester was where I went to most of middle school and high school, so if I consider everything after puberty being life, then that’s where I’m from.  But I lived in Richmond the longest—8 years there, only 6 in Rochester.  I eventually settled on telling people I’m from Western New York, which is the go-to answer for me still.  If it becomes important later, I fill them in on the rest.  All this moving around really seemed to confuse the idea of home for me.

            During the dog park days, I think Lucy had begun to feel a little too at home in the park.  She had many friends who were there at the same time as us every day and they had begun to form a little pack.  Lucy is very alpha-female and I think that she felt she was in charge.  If there was a dog that approached her pack that she did not like, Lucifer emerged telling them to go away.  After this happened a few times, I started to get a bit nervous taking her to the park.  I even started taking long walks with her before going to the park in an attempt to help her not be so wired there.  But things started to look less hopeful after a while.

            In our last few months there, Lucy and I had befriended a German Shepherd named Jackson and his mom Emily.  Emily and I got along really well and were both in some really “uncomfortable” living situations.   Despite the work that had gone into the loft I was living in, the situation with my roommates had become somewhat awkward, to state it lightly.  For reasons that don’t need to be elaborated upon here (because they have nothing to do with dogs or running), Lucy and I needed a new home, and so did Emily and Jackson.  We spent a few grueling weeks trying to convince landlords to allow 2 large dogs into an apartment and finally settled on a place in Queens.  It was hard for me to make this move, despite the fact that I had found a great roommate and Lucy had too—Lucy and Jackson developed a kind of brother/sister relationship where they bossed each other around, played, and then cuddled when they were done.  When we had to stop going to the dog park, Lucy still had Jackson and as I began to lose touch with all my dog park friends, at least Emily was still there.

            During my 6 years in NYC, I was very much a transient.  I spent a year in the dorms at school, then moved in with a friend in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  I then cycled through that and 2 other apartments in Williamsburg in the next 4 years.  Williamsburg had come to feel a little like a home, even if I didn’t have a consistent apartment there.  I knew the neighborhood inside and out.  After I got Lucy, I felt I had learned even more about it from our long and winding walks.  The best way to get to know a neighborhood is on foot with a dog.  When we moved out to Queens, I felt as though I was being removed from everything familiar.  I loved our apartment, which was larger and cheaper than any I’d had in NYC, but I was losing my home again.  I started to wonder, am I someone who is ever going to be able to stay put?  Will I ever feel settled?  Am I ever going to have a “home?”

            After making the final NYC move to Queens, I decided a year later to move out to Seattle, the details of which will be discussed in the future.  A very good friend of mine went around and took pictures of all my apartments in the city and framed them as a going away present.  It hangs in a very central location in my apartment today.  

I’m now on my second apartment in Seattle now and every time I look at those New York apartments, I remember that lost feeling I used to have.  It’s good to remember that feeling because it was so all-encompassing to me for so long, but I don’t really feel it anymore.  I’ve come to the belief that home has nothing to do with where I live.  Right now, Lucy is what makes me feel like I have a home.  She was with me in NYC watching me struggle through my first 2 years of teaching.  She was with me in those last 2 apartments.  Then she moved with me to Seattle and settled in with me at our first apartment here.  She watched me adjust to life on the other coast, making friends, growing into my own skin.  She became a runner with me.  She is with me now in my 2^nd apartment in 3 years here in Seattle.  She has watched me survive my ups and downs.  She has watched me change, and she has been with me through all those changes.  She has been with me through every moment of the last 5 years of my life, and I can’t say that about anybody else.  I think “home” means that you are in a place where you feel loved, supported, and comfortable.  As cheesy as it sounds, right now Lucy is my home.  Hopefully one day my home will include more than just a dog—a family of my own making would be an incredible home.  But until that happens, I have Lucy. 

One of my students last year gave me a very nice bookmark as an end of the year thank-you present.  On the bookmark is a quote by Josh Billings: “A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.”  Nothing could be more true.