Road Trip!

“Expatriates voluntarily live in an alien country, usually for personal or social reasons. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were not forced to live in France. Expatriates may share in the solitude and estrangement of exile, but they do not suffer under its rigid proscriptions.” Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile

I have been back in the US for a month now, one week of which involved a road trip across the Northeast so that my seventeen-year-old daughter and I could do a very ambitious college tour.

We drove through familiar cities and towns, places I had visited, lived in and loved, some held good memories, others bad. We made discoveries together, had fun encounters and adventures, learned, walked, saw a ton, and spent time with dear friends. During the trip, perhaps because we spent so much time in college towns, I felt very much at home.  I grew up as a child of academia, am an academic manqué, I love my alma maters, and my life’s work was mentoring undergraduates, so I suppose it’s not surprising that I feel a sense of belonging when I’m on college campuses.

Boston College’s stunning campus

Identity Crises

Studying Said’s fascinating essay, which is still highly relevant to our current global scenario, I started fixating on the notions of identity, place, belonging, and home.

I often ask myself if I could move back. Where would I go? Where could I go? Where could I afford to live? I feel out of place and lost in the suburbs, prostrate to a car and at the mercy of angry drivers, clone after clone of strip malls, upscale coffee bars and gourmet street food. Could I live in one of those picture-perfect New England college towns, in bucolic upstate New York, in a city like Boston which reminds me, in some ways, of Florence? How far north or south or west would I be willing to go? Would I ever feel a sense of belonging? Have I ever felt a sense of belonging?

Coffee & Sympathy

Yet how Italian or European am I really? I fall so easily back into the convenience of America. That’s what I miss most, and I embrace it when I’m here. I aways allow for extra time for everything since I’m used to most things simply taking longer in Italy and I’m always amused and satisfied because things are quicker and easier here. 

Except for coffee, Italians are serious about their coffee making and drinking and, quite frankly, I’ve spent way too much time on this trip waiting for subpar coffee. In that regard, I feel very Italian.

What started out as a profound rumination on my feeling like an outlier and trying to make sense of my identity and what I call home, seems to have deteriorated into a superficial rant about weak coffee, but that’s not what it is at all. It’s part of why this duality is both a blessing and a curse.

As I discussed in my first podcast episode ever, the blessing is that at least some of the time I feel a sense of home somewhere.  I realize more and more as I get older that that comes from people mostly, but place, smells, taste, sounds, and memory play important roles, too. The curse is that I often feel out of place, suspended in mid-air, misplaced, or displaced, regardless of where I am. 

I began this piece with the road trip and that’s where it needs to end or perhaps it is yet another point of departure, one more key step in an itinerary of awakening and awareness.