It’s a breezy warm evening, and I reflect once again: home at last, home at last.
I’ve been back in Newport Beach for about four months now, and each day I think how happy I am to finally be home. At Home. It seems that for years I’ve been in search of home but never quite got there.
Somewhat unusual for an American kid — families move around so much — I stayed in the same childhood home from 3 to 18. But it wasn’t a happy home. From around 13 or so, I just counted my time until I was Out.
Out to where? Out to a new place to call home? Just Out. And then I was out, at college and into a succession of places to stay. A campus apartment. Living in a trailer on the now sadly removed Irvine Meadows West campus trailer park (UCI literally paved paradise and put up a parking lot. My article on it remains trapped behind the LA Times paywall). The glory of moving to a beach apartment for the first time, of leaning out my window, looking between two other buildings and being able to see a sliver of the ocean. Good memories; but all temporary shelter. None of them home.
Then post-college, more apartments at the beach in Newport, but still none of them home. Who knew what I was going to do — stay working in California? Go to graduate school? Would this internet thing take off? Each time I saw the beach, I savored it, knowing I’d inevitably have to say goodbye to it.
And then to Britain, where I really did finally have a home. At least in the purchased sense. I was a homeowner for the first time; I had all the trappings of a home, but somehow I never felt At Home. For me, home had to be back in California.
Trips back, there were many of them, always bittersweet. Always a return to seeing the beach and the continual goodbyes once again to it.
Now for the first time in over two decades (I am getting so old), I’m At Home again. Not renting. Not saying goodbye to the beach each day but hello. It’s nice to see you. I’ll see you tomorrow. And you’re not going away.
Foolishness, in some ways. We never really know where we’re going, where we’re going to stay, what’s to come. But at least I’ve got home for now.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes, the beach. I grew up in Pittsburgh where there are 300 days of no sun. Inside I always had a feeling that my home was close to water, just not the kind that fell vertically.
Then I found myself a block from the beach in San Clemente where the waves lulled me to sleep every night. It was where my beautiful wife and I met and started a family, where both my daughters were born.
Each day my girls were at the beach. The two little ones had no fear of the waves as they ran into them, fell and started laughing as the tide pulled them out while I ran like crazy to snatch them back.
It’s been a decade and a half since we’ve left.
Thanks for the great reminder – It’s time to come home … to the beach.
Hi Danny
Kind of envious of your new lifestyle -leaving us in damp England.
You’ve posted a couple of times about how happy you are – I hope that your wife and son have settled in as well. Just as much as you were away whilst living in the UK they are now “away” in the US.