Home Is Not Where I Thought It Would Be
I’ve lived in the South now—in North Carolina—for exactly half my life. The only thing more surprising than that to me is that I wound up here in the first place.
It’s been both a circuitous and surprising route to this homeplace. As a child and young adult, I never thought I would be at home anywhere other than where I was born and grew up: New York City. I was the embodiment of that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, the one that honestly showed city residents’ condescending perspective, the continent ending just beyond the Hudson River.
The city—we locals never called it New York, it was just “the city”—was the unassailable epicenter of the world to those of us who grew up there in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The only place to live. (In fact, I am descended from a strongly New York–centric line. Soon after we moved to North Carolina, to Chapel Hill, my New York parents came to visit. On a walk, we introduced them to new neighbors we had met. My father asked the man where he was from, since we had told my parents pretty much everyone in Chapel Hill appeared to be originally from somewhere else. Chicago, the man told my father. “What’s it like living in the sticks?” my father asked, without a hint of irony.)
New Yorkers like me basked in the city’s reflected glory even if we lived leagues away from the klieg lights. We had Broadway theater and Wall Street clout. We had fashion and movies and television shows. And where else could you get bagels? Who, anywhere else, would understand that the D train was an express north of 59th Street?
And then.
Because my wife and I were both freelance writers who theoretically could work anywhere, because we owned neither house nor car nor had any children at the time, and because we loved the grandeur of the French language and the allure of French culture, and could do it, we moved to Paris. Because, of course, Paris was just like New York, but with baguettes.
It wasn’t easy to do in what now seems like that primitive, pre-smartphone era. Today, people who choose to live overseas mostly never really leave home—they just leave a place. But we felt back then we could be at home in Paris because it was big and important like New York and there was a subway there, too, although the pizza was disappointing. We would still be firmly lodged at the center of the world, just one with more subjunctive verbs. We knew that if Steinberg had drawn a cover representing Parisians’ view of the world, the continent would have ended a little east of the Seine. We fit right in.
The idea was to stay for a couple of years. Then, of course, back to New York.
And then.
We moved again, this time to a tiny village in the south of France, in the Luberon region, to a mountain village of 400 people and no subway. City kids all our lives, we had somehow determined that we could create a home in the countryside. We had finally understood that if New York was not America, and it wasn’t, Paris was not France. We wanted what the French called la France profonde. Deep France, sort of like the Deep South. We had absolutely no idea how profonde it was.
We moved into a sixteenth-century stone house, with what appeared to be sixteenth-century stone plumbing. The house was built into the village’s ramparts. American friends who visited thought it was quaint. When the hot water didn’t work and we had a bat flying around in the rotted rafters of our bedroom, quaint wasn’t quite the word that first came to mind.
Our closest neighbors, aged sister and brother Marthe and Marius, were welcoming. Subsistence farmers, they welcomed us with a freshly killed rabbit along with a crock of the rabbit’s blood, so we could make the sauce. We tried to figure out a gentle way to thank them that wouldn’t encourage them to do it again.
The two years we had planned on staying abroad ended up becoming nearly a decade. And yet we knew, I think all the time, that something was missing.
Although neighbors treated us well, and we had friends, and our son was born in France and went to the maternelle there, and although we had prized ten-year residency cards, and we finally could speak the language with some competency, we were never fully at home.
Of course, we would never be French; the French would not allow it, not legally or culturally. And we could not imagine it. How could we be French if we never fully were able to trill our “r’s”? We hadn’t gone to the lycée and been subjected to the dreaded dictées. We never could fathom the French fascination with the comedian Jerry Lewis. We couldn’t stomach andouille sausage. We weren’t formal and rigid and correct and logical and philosophical like the French. Our sensibility, forged on the D train, was so very different.
So, not French, but no longer American either.
In that pre-internet era, pre-Amazon era, pre-CNN era, pre-FedEx era, we were disconnected from the essence of American life. We didn’t much care about the Super Bowl; we didn’t even know who was playing. We didn’t know what was happening to Britney Spears. We didn’t watch Dallas and had no idea who JR was and so didn’t care who might have shot him. We found out that John Lennon had been shot to death only the day after it happened, when we meandered through our village to buy the Le Provencal newspaper at the one épicerie in town.
It was as if, American friends said later, we had been holed up in a monastery.
Not fully at home in either place, not in France or America, we thought of ourselves as somewhere mid-Atlantic. We were at sea, searching vainly for roots, and it’s hard to find roots in the water. We may have been reasonably comfortable in both places, could find our way in Manhattan or Montmartre, but we didn’t feel truly embedded in either.
When we decided it was time to return to the States—our parents were aging, our son needed services not available in France—to find those roots, we knew just one thing: it wouldn’t be to New York. I believe this is called a 360.
Living away for nearly ten years had given us new perspective on what home meant. The width—and depth—of Steinberg’s cover had broadened. The world indeed existed beyond the Hudson River. And after moving from Paris to our tiny village in Provence, we had grown accustomed to the intimacy of small.
We liked that the mechanic and the baker and the pharmacist and the one town doctor all knew us by name. We liked that the phone number for the one butcher in town was 72. We enjoyed the view of vast expanses of electric lavender in midsummer. We reveled in having a fig tree in the front of our stone house and picking cherries from an overhanging branch while walking in autumn.
We also had grown accustomed to both the literal warmth of la californie francaise and to the quiet and slower pace of life. We no longer wanted the literal and figurative coldness of that big city up north. We no longer could tolerate the intensity, the noise, the twenty-four-hour constant hubbub of life. Maybe we had not just grown away, maybe we had grown up, too.
But, still, the South, where the weather indeed was warmer and the pace was slower and the intensity level lower? As a contemptuous urban northerner, I had never imagined living anywhere in the South. “The South” was the danger of the film Deliverance or maybe the trash of Eskine Caldwell’s novel Tobacco Road or the desperation of Agee and Evans’s Depression-era Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It was poor, threatening, retrograde, racist.
Turns out, we discovered, the South had changed. Or our impressions were very dated.
The town of Chapel Hill had the services our son needed and good weather and the right size and a university and a place where we could buy reasonable wine and even a few stores back then that sold acceptable baguettes. The pace of life was, once again, slow and steady. Just like in the south of France, the language was spoken with an easy drawl, a dramatic change from the clipped, hurried cadences of northern speech. Small-town life in the South was not, after all, that different from small-town life in France.
We moved to Chapel Hill without knowing a soul who lived there. But since mostly everyone did appear to be from somewhere else, we made friends easily and quickly. Over time, we got jobs, we joined groups, we ensconced ourselves. We found home.
This is how rooted we feel now: We’ve been seeing the same dentist for twenty-five years. Same dermatologist, for almost thirty years. The woman who cuts our hair—both my wife’s and mine—has been doing that for us for thirty-plus years. The pizza guy on Franklin Street knows me by name. The butcher recognizes me.
And somewhere along that circuitous route that brought us here, we’ve learned that Dorothy was right.
A little more than a year after we had moved to Paris, we were evicted from our apartment on the Left Bank. It turned out that the man who had rented us the apartment was, in fact, a renter himself and didn’t have the right to do that—or to charge us 2,000 francs a month while he was paying 500 francs. Innocents abroad, we had no idea. He must have seen us coming.
Eventually, the real owner found out and a court officer knocked on our door late one cold night in mid-December with a notice that we had to vacate the place within a month.
Three thousand miles away from what had been our home almost all our lives, with few friends and few resources, facing an implacably impenetrable bureaucratic system, at sea in a different language and culture, we had no idea what to do. We were depressed and it was Christmas Eve and we jumped at the chance to see something familiar and homey like The Wizard of Oz, being broadcast on French television that night for the first time in many years.
In front of our tiny little set, at the end of the film, when Dorothy says, “Oh, Auntie Em—there’s no place like home!” we knew exactly what she meant. And then we both cried.