The Gift of Home
Today’s “gift” comes from Red Sox fan Kate Mayhew. The hometown sports pride that reverberates through Boston helped Kate find home, just as becoming a Pats fan has helped me connect to my new home. Here’s to friends, family, and a sense of home (in any shape or form) this Hanukkah.
“Homeless”
by Kate Mayhew
I used to consider myself homeless. Figuratively, of course, but I always resented it. I felt I’d been denied a key ingredient to my identity. Perpetually envious of friends fortunate enough to have grown up in the same state, city, even house their whole lives, I painfully wanted roots. When I was 10, I convinced myself that I’d never get married: everyone knows boys want to marry the girl-next-door. When my family is inevitably re-stationed 3,000 miles away, I’ll be the girl-across-the continental-United States. Not nearly the same appeal.
I sustained this temper tantrum through college, which I naively anticipated being the Great Equalizer. Let my dad get re-stationed, I thought. Army, do your worst! I won’t be switching schools this time! Uproot me if you will, but I’ll be going to the same tiny village in New York every fall for the next four years. Finally, I’ll be just like everybody else!
What they didn’t tell me is that the first two questions anyone asks you in college are: 1) “What’s your name?” (Easy enough!) and 2) “Where are you from?” (Fuckshitpiss.)
I was often encouraged to consider my family “home,” but this suggestion always struck me as irrelevant. My family and I are a unit – I had zero choice in the matter, believe me. Where Dad went, we followed. And for this reason, there’ll never be anyone closer to me on this earth. But they aren’t “home.” And my parents feel the same, though they’ll never admit it. I know this because they’re nearly 65, and they’ve yet to pick a place to retire.
While my undergraduate years in Clinton afforded me with by far the most freedom I’d ever tasted – precisely 6 and a half hours from my parents and just long enough to nix any possibility of a visit uncomplicated by hotel reservations – I was disappointed to find myself in an environment more saturated by hometown pride than any other I’d come across thus far. Conversations often struck up over familiar haunts back home. Friendships were forged and cultivated based exclusively on a shared love of the Red Sox, the Yankees, the Jets, the Mets. A sports-lover’s devotion is inextricably linked to her hometown, and once again I found myself lacking.
But I refused to ride the bandwagon. I had no genuine allegiance to these athletes, no stake in their performance. I’d never been to that diner on 10th with the amazing BLTs and the quirky waitress who calls everyone by the wrong name. I don’t care about that touchdown so I’d rather not chest-bump you on its account, and I really don’t understand why the kids from eastern Massachusetts are always making fun of the kids from western Massachusetts.
I was different all over again, and I was pissed.
By the end of my junior year, I was desperate for a change. I’d applied for an internship in Boston and moved there to teach during the first semester of my senior year. I didn’t particularly like the city at first – it was too cold and the people talked funny. I lived with one other intern in a house on the side of Route 9 – a highway to which the left-hand turn remains a perpetual anomaly.
One September day, I was given tickets to a Sox game. I’ve always loved baseball games, but having no stake in the outcome tended to dampen the experience a bit. I figured at the very least, it was a free opportunity to explore local culture and I really wanted a hot dog.
If I arrived with indifference, I left at a loss. Perched at the end of my seat on the third-base sideline in Fenway, rapt as the Sox barreled towards what would ultimately become “the end of the streak,” swallowed by that screaming, throbbing mass of hometown pride, I couldn’t help but feel a part of it. My heart swelled with each new surge from the crowd, and I literally laughed out loud as the feeling came in waves which seemed to mimic the motion of the stadium – no one could hear me anyway. It was exciting and warm and everywhere I turned. It was home.
Immediately after college, I returned to Boston. It is the first place I set my bags down once the nest was firmly flown, and predictably, I haven’t moved since. I’m not so sure it’s an unadulterated love of dirty water that’s kept me here, so much as it’s just the plain fact that Boston’s the first home I’ve ever in my life had the opportunity to select solely by, and for, myself. And for that reason, it’s become impossible to leave.
