Miss Liberty

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WARNING - Beware the champagne flights on Air Jamaica.
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We are all tourists.

Who is not from somewhere else? We share a space for a time, as we move from locale to locale. We may set for quite a spell at one particular location, but are we really a resident? Really a native? What makes us so?

I left “The Rock” for the holidays, anticipating a few weeks of Italian Beef and Doctor Jeremiah Weed. Tastes I know and love (at least the beef) from another time zone - a place not the same as when I left it months ago. Presumably, I was going home.

But what makes Chicagoland any more our home than Montego Freeport? What draws us to either place? Is it the food? Perhaps that, and the other comfortable surroundings which help us to paint the picture of a place, so that we can look back upon it with a sense of longing. It is the feeling that makes us glad to be home in the evening, happy to be surrounded by familiar stuff, faces, sounds, smells and tastes.

Montego Bay is fast becoming that place for me,... the smell of jerk as I drive hither and yon,... the look of the sunrise across the harbor in the morning, as Ra appears above the hills of town.

I watched him arrive the morning we departed, chasing the clouds over the horizon. Later we went to the beach, where our newly coded response to the smell and taste of the veg patties drew us to the stand where we always get our veg patties. When we left, traffic was as sucky as normal, yet beckoned me to join the fray. There was nowhere to park at the grocery, and they had not the food item which I was sure they would have. It was all so typical, so expected, so comforting.

A few hours later and I was in Chicagoland. Home of the cheesy beef and sausage combo, with fries and a large Coke (“you wanna tamale wit dat?”). Home to a different style of traffic snarl. Home to our folks and many friends. The place where I became aware. In a few days we would trek north to the cabin, or Taj Mahal, if you will, where we would consume Leinienkugels to excess, and sing songs of drunken mice around the wood burning stove. “Have a pull on the Weed”, Two-J will yell,... and we will be home yet again.

Home is where I am, it seems. It is a mobile home.

Is this just a facet of life overseas, a calling to numerous locations, each with their own familiar faces and familiar confines? I suppose that these comfortable and familiar surroundings do not become that way all at once, nor do they come to everyone, expatriates or not. There are those I have met who never acclimate to new surroundings. Their home must be a tiny place.

I wander, but I am not a wanderer. My desire to travel is a need to get somewhere else, to discover some new destination, to position myself in it and make the most it. To arrive however, I need to be going. I am going now, while writing the draft for this missive, sitting in a plane over who knows where, flying back and forth between homes.

Later, in Chicagoland, I read a familiar plaque in my ma’s kitchen, “No matter where I serve my guests, it seems they like my kitchen best”. Sure, “Home is where the hearth is”.

There is another which reads, “The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here.” This is a fine sentiment, unless you are about to broadside a wayward bovine.

Enter the third,... “Some people come into our lives - leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same”. Ouch! Wish I had not read that one.
Perhaps the next treatise will be on the quality and variations in locally available cane based sweeteners, instead of this campy, misty-eyed, happy post-holiday variety.

Peace and Love. Read More......