Longing for home

I grew up in western Michigan and moved back there in retirement, but for nearly 50 years I lived away. In what sense is western Michigan my home? Even now I can’t say.

Here's my December column for the Holland Sentinel. I always have more to say but I have a 750-word limit. For my monthly newspaper column I’ve returned, as you’ll see, to that Thanksgiving service in Leiden:

On the last Thursday in November, I took a train from The Hague, where I am currently living, to Leiden, a nearby city. I was going to participate in an interfaith Thanksgiving service for Americans who live abroad.

On my way to the train station, though, I began to feel sad, and since the walk was a long one I had lots of time to think. For me it was Thanksgiving morning, but for everyone around me it was Thursday. In other words, just another day. Everyone was hurrying, as always, to bring children to school and then to go to work.

I have always loved Thanksgiving, but then I love most American holidays. When I lived abroad previously (this is my third time at it), during the holidays I would feel similar feelings of loneliness and sadness, what the Bible, interestingly, calls desolation, a richer and more descriptive term.

One reason for my loneliness on that morning last month—in addition to the holiday—was the prospect of a Thanksgiving service that was heavy on patriotism and low on everything else. As eager as I am to get back to my country of origin, I knew that chanting “USA, USA” would not lift me out of my doldrums.

Happily, the service, which didn’t have much religious content, even though it met in a gorgeous old church building, built around 1100, was inspiring. I left feeling much better. We didn’t chant “USA, USA,” but we did hear the story of the Pilgrims who made their way from England to Leiden in 1609 and settled there for eleven years. The church, the Pieterskerk, has a fairly large memorial for this group of Puritans (there were about a hundred of them), because they worshiped there regularly and made a deep impression on the locals.

Eventually, though, the Puritans boarded the Mayflower and headed for the new world, where among other things they are credited with starting the Thanksgiving Day tradition. In other words, we heard a story with deep meaning—and in some ways, our story, a story we have heard in various ways since childhood.

As it turns out, I am not the first person ever to feel sad, lonely, and desolate about being so far from home. Lots of people, including several hundred Americans I met at the interfaith service, have had similar feelings. It’s hard to be away from home. It’s hard to think about all the familiar things, knowing that they will be out of reach for a long time to come. It helps a little, but only a little, to be with others who speak the same language and who share at least some of the same experiences.

Vast numbers of people over the years have experienced these feelings, sometimes more profoundly than I did. I never asked my father, for example, about his wartime experience, but I know that he spent more than two years in the Pacific toward the end of World War II. I’m not sure why I never brought it up, except that in childhood I would not have known how to ask the question. Also, “greatest generation” men were not known for discussing their feelings.

I would see him shuffle a deck of cards (in a way that a Dutch Reformed elder perhaps shouldn’t know), and I would say, “Where did you learn to do that?” His response, invariably, was, “in the service.” I never realized, not fully, all the meaning he attached to the words “in the service.”

What I didn’t understand at the time was how many hours he spent by himself, undoubtedly surrounded by fellow servicemen, but by himself nevertheless. And so, he played cards, shot pool, smoked cigarettes, and sometimes waged war. I now understand at least a little of how he felt and how eager he must have been to come home and stay home and never leave home again, except for brief travels here and there to see the rest of the world. I know the feeling.

Always for me the inner longing is for home. But home, I now realize, is hard to define. I grew up in western Michigan and moved back there in retirement, but for nearly 50 years I lived away. In what sense is western Michigan my home? Even now I can’t say.

What I know is that I feel it when I’m there. It is familiar to me in a way that dozens of other places have never been. Also, I am known there, sort of, or feel as though I am. I walk along Eighth Street in Holland, and I think, “These are my people. I belong here. I never want to leave again.”

I hope to be there for the holidays next year.

Photos: (above) Always a lot to see in Amsterdam. (middle) More from Amsterdam. (below) A birthday card from my mother.