Close to home

These days I haven’t had much time for walking, so I’ve been hunkering down close to home. All this week I’ve spent most of my days on campus, inside, so I cherish that handful of moments in the morning when the dog and I go outside and inspect the premises. This habit of standing in the yard while the dog sniffs and pees is something I picked up when we lived in Hillsboro and our “yard” was a mossy, wildflower-speckled patch that refused the term “lawn.” I found it oddly refreshing to stand outside for a spell just taking in the neighborhood, and that experience hasn’t changed now that we’ve exchanged a woodsy housing development for a more thickly settled college town.

Home has always been where you find it, and Chris and I have moved around quite a bit. In twelve years of marriage, we’ve lived in seven different towns in three different states; the longest we lived in any one place was the four years we lived in Hillsboro, our solitary stab at home ownership. In general, I hate moving: I hate the disruption to my beloved ordinary routine, hate the inevitable weeding out it entails. (After so many relocations, I can point to various books and CDs I have bought two, three, or even four times since every time we move I sell or give away a huge portion of my belongings, a choice I always ultimately regret.) Chris is and always has been the restless, wandering type; I am and always have been something of a routine-loving homebody. At the same time, though, I’ve always ended up loving, deeply, whatever place we’ve found ourselves, seeking out those secret spots of familiarity that hide virtually everywhere.

How very interesting, then, that several other bloggers have within the past few days grappled with this issue of place and our connection to it, a theme that I can’t seem to avoid. In some sort of cosmic convergence, Gary from Inkmusings has written several posts on the question of where we choose to find home while Andi from Overboard is contemplating the question of where to live (Korea or elsewhere, in a Zen Center or not) in several posts about priorities. The question of what to do with one’s life seems intrinsically and even necessarily linked with where one currently is and where one is ultimately headed. Although the motto “grow where you’re planted” has a certain ring of truth, we are in the end more ambulatory and more consciously sentient than plants. Unlike plants, we can and do decide to uproot and wander, and unlike plants we can and do exercise the power to choose where to set down our taproot.

Reading of Andi’s experiences as a single American woman teaching English in Korea always evokes in me a sense of what might have been: had I gone down a different path, I could be living that life, and I could live it still. Although I’ve always been something of a homebody, the thought of teaching overseas, of arriving somewhere with two suitcases and a passport, has a definite sense of allure, a fact that would probably surprise many who think they know me. Even now, Chris occasionally broaches the topic of us moving overseas: what would it be like, for instance, if I got a teaching assignment abroad and he could study and play early music in those very places where it was conceived? And yet despite my own what-if musings, I always hesitate when this idea is introduced: there is so much here, so much now, that gets in the way of such wide-ranging geographic speculations.

Gary is right in noting that it’s all about choices: as Andi likewise notes, it’s about having the independence both to make and to act upon one’s decisions. Deciding where to live or when to move is a hugely personal choice; in the context of marriage, such decisions are hugely complicated. The part of me that recoils from the “where do we live next” conversation is recoiling in large part from the give-and-take of deciding, the inevitable tension that results when two separate sets of what-if’s confront and collide. What happens when one person wants to live in the city and the other wants to live in the country, or one person wants to live in the States and the other wants to travel abroad? Apart from some Green Acres scenario, something’s gotta give. In past moves, I’ve felt a certain sense of being dragged into a new situation that I agreed to but didn’t actively choose. Although Chris’s sense of such compromises would undoubtedly differ from mine, there is a world of (internal) difference between choosing and assenting, from steering the ship versus agreeing to go along with someone else’s steering.

These issues are on the surface of consciousness for me ever since I finished the dissertation: once I grab hold of my diploma on Saturday, I’ll be free to apply for professorial jobs any- and everywhere I choose. Academic couples have it worse than Chris and I do: they have to navigate the impossible challenge of getting two scholars settled into academic positions within some semblance of geographic proximity. Some fifteen years ago when Chris also wanted to go to graduate school in English–back when he would have specialized in American literature just like me–one of our professors pulled him aside. “Schaub, you can’t go to graduate school in the same field as Ms. DiSabato. You’ll always end up competing with one another, and she’s brighter than you.” Whether this esteemed professor was right on that score is a matter of some domestic debate. What remains undeniable, though, is the fact that these questions of what to do, where to go, and when to take the next step are troublesome enough when contemplated by a single soul much less than by two.

Several winters ago, Chris and I put the dog in the car and drove to Arizona, where we rented a small RV and camped on the outskirts of Phoenix and Sedona. At the time, Chris was reading The Dharma Bums, a book I’d been assigning to my Lit of the Open Road students. Fueled by Japhy Ryder’s outrageous spontaneity and the pure joy that emanated from Jack Kerouac’s exuberant prose, Chris kept talking about quitting his job, playing guitar full-time, and swapping our house for an RV. To his chagrin, I was less than entirely thrilled with the idea; although we did agree that he should quit his job and pursue music full time, I nixed the RV. Does that mean I’m not a true Dharma bum, that my apparent zeal for the open road and the prose it inspires is mere sham? I don’t think so. Then as now I realized that an RV is a small space for two people; musicians in particular have a lot of gear and make a lot of noise. Although I’ve dragged my feet more than a bit on every one of our cross-country car trips, wanting to walk more and drive less, there is part of me (a secret, hidden part) that dreams of wandering, roaming, and Dharma-bumming from Zen Center to Zen Center with not much more than the Dharma in tow. It’s all about choices, though, and a gun-to-the-head Dharma bum ain’t much of a bum after all. The next time the two of us hit the road in an RV or otherwise, it want it to be me at the wheel steering.