Dorothy was right

What’s a place you visited that felt like home?
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The Away Game

As I’ve written about before here on the blog, I’m not a terribly extensive traveler. I am lucky enough to have traveled overseas once and visited—or at least traveled through—a few dozen states here in America.

But the truth is, as much as I hate to admit this sometimes, Dorothy was right in The Wizard of Oz: There is no place like home.

And yes, as Daniel-san says to Kumiko in The Karate Kid Part II right before the big typhoon hits, “Home is where you hang your hat.” But I think it’s one thing to live somewhere and a whole different matter to actually feel like that place is home.

I always thought of South Carolina as a chapter where I was fundamentally just playing an away game. Maybe that’s because Wisconsin feels like a surrogate second home—being a neighboring Midwest state, it shares a certain gravity, a cultural shorthand that feels normal to my bones. When my brother lived in Minnesota, it felt the same way. The Midwest is just home territory. In South Carolina, I always felt like an outsider looking in.

Even now, sitting in my classroom, I’ve got a University of Wisconsin flag hanging on the wall. Sure, it’s because I’m endlessly proud of Kid 1, but I’ve grown to genuinely like the place, too. And granted, they earned a massive dose of my loyalty when they gave him a scholarship.

Surviving the Humidity

South Carolina didn’t give me that kind of rootedness, and looking back, I know I merely survived it. That probably had a lot to do with the fact that my marriage was in trouble for a longer time than I realized. Packing up your roots, leaving your support network, and stripping away every familiar face is an astonishingly daunting task, no matter who you are or why you went.

I tried, though. I really tried to make myself belong. Maybe I should have embraced the local flavor a little more. I always loved going to Charleston RiverDogs games at Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park. And I’ll give South Carolina this: that is where I finally fell in love with the ocean. That is where I finally learned to understand Jimmy Buffett’s music.

I can still close my eyes and smell those dog days of summer when the humidity was so thick it felt like walking through a sponge, holding bottles of beer that were sweating faster than I could drink them. I remember walking through that stadium concourse one night and hearing “Sweet Home Alabama” echoing over the loudspeakers. No, I wasn’t in Alabama, but for a time, I was a southerner. And having actually lived down there, I think I finally understand that song the way it was meant to be understood.

That’s one of the things I would have traded away if I had built a permanent life for myself down there. And I was on my way to doing just that. X1 and I were married; we had Kid 1. In the months and years to come, he might have had children, and his children might have had children, and even if we didn’t live in South Carolina forever, we would have started our own historical roots—our own family ties, if you will—to that area.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. X1 and I divorced. Now Kid 1 is going to college in Wisconsin, and I think he will probably move out of the state sooner rather than later. In the grand scheme of things, South Carolina was just two presidential terms of office.

The Anchor of History

As much as I bitch and moan about Michigan—our schizophrenic weather, our crappy roads, and our god-awful winters—it is home. More than that, it will always feel like home to me. A big reason for that is my family history is anchored right here. My parents grew up here. My grandparents, although they were born out of state, made lives for themselves here in Michigan. I can look at downtown Detroit and the surrounding suburbs and be old enough to say, “Yeah, that building was here way back in the day.” I carry that continuity passed down from both my parents and my grandparents.

I really have no idea what the future holds for me. If you had to ask me right now, I would assume that I’m probably going to live in Michigan for the rest of my life, but there’s no guarantee of that. After all, I didn’t see South Carolina on my radar, but I ended up moving there anyway.

So, to answer the initial daily prompt: nothing has ever felt like home to me, except for home itself.

Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Having crossed the 1,000-day milestone, I’m now charting the territory beyond. The mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.

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the “Dorothy Was Right” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.

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