A Place Doesn't Make You; You Make The Place

On Hiraeth; Salvation Springs and Finding Home

When my youngest son Eli was a brand new baby, I’d turn on soothing music from an up-and-coming singer called Teddy Swims as I held him to help put him to sleep. As Eli became a toddler, he would ask for me to play these videos by pointing and making cute little urgent noises and doing the sign language for music. Relegated to being a video DJ at times, I recently found myself watching Teddy perform a cover of Miranda Lambert’s hit song, “The House that Built Me,” on YouTube.

As I listened, I found myself feeling unexpectedly emotional. Here’s the song:

Here are a few of the lyrics:

I know they say you can't go home again
I just had to come back one last time
Ma'am, I know you don't know me from Adam
But these hand prints on the front steps are mine

Up those stairs in that little back bedroom
Is where I did my homework and I learned to play guitar
And I bet you didn't know under that live oak
My favorite dog is buried in the yard

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here, it's like I'm someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself

If I could just come in, I swear I'll leave
Won't take nothin' but a memory
From the house that built me

I’m not quite sure why this song gets to me. As far as I ever knew, I didn’t have a “house that built me.” And yet something in that feeling of wanting to go back to the place where you lived when you were small, to re-live the memories you built there, strongly resonated with me.

I was born in 1977, in the former shoe factory town of Johnson City, New York. We didn’t stay there for long, though. I wasn’t an Army brat, but I might as well have been. My father worked in retail sales management — department stores when I was young, construction supply when I was older — and he got transferred around a lot. My parents moved something like 8 times in my first five years. We bounced from place to place, touring small towns in Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, until finally landing in Stafford Springs, Connecticut for most of the 1980s.

Stafford was not some bucket list destination for my parents. It was, however, just down the road from Somers, Connecticut, where a number of the members of my extended family, all originally from New York as I was, had moved. They had done so to remain in proximity to a Catholic retreat house known as the “Apostolic Formation Center.” The founder of that center, J. Roy Legere, had allegedly been some kind of visionary. What he turned out to be was a man with some absolutely bizarre theological ideas who convinced some of his closest male followers to engage in ritual homosexual acts he claimed would allow them to collectively attain a form of “Divine Intimacy.” Although Legere died in 1978, these were the days when Church coverup of sexual predation was common. As such, the allegations didn’t hit the media until 1985.

If the psychopathic apostolate that brought my family and others together in Northern Connecticut fizzled out, the Catholic community that had been drawn to Somers remained, and grew.

My maternal grandparents’ modest home on the South side of Binghamton, New York, was the only constant place I went “home” to until my grandmother died in 2011. I can still walk through the rooms in my mind, still smell the leftover coffee in the percolator, hear the popping of the baseboard heaters. But although that house anchored me to a permanent sense of place for more than three decades, it was never my house. I only visited. I never lived there. I suppose, then, that the little two-bedroom, one-bath upstairs of a duplex on Fiske Ave. in Stafford is the closest place I ever had to “a house that built me.” And in that sense, Stafford Springs, which I left behind 34 years ago, is the place that feels like my real home town.

When I moved my family to New Hampshire in late 2021, I was, I realize now, trying to re-capture that feeling — not just for me, but for my kids. More than once, on trips that took me through Connecticut, I’d slip off the highway and drive by the old house to have a look.

“I thought if I could touch this place or feel it, this brokenness inside me might start healing…”

I took my wife. I took my kids. My wife, who was gently chiding me about the need to go back over and over again, accidentally got the name of the town wrong, calling it “Salvation Springs.”

And in a way, I think that’s exactly what it represented to me. Salvation. Salvation from a sense of disconnectedness and displacement, from the feeling of never being quite where I’m supposed to be; from the endless search for a place that feels like home.

See? I seemed to be saying to everyone I brought by the place, this is the place I lived when I had some idea who I was. When I felt like I belonged. Before I got lost along the way.

When I lived in the house, it had old shingle siding in hideous green, and a barn out back in a matching shade.

Don’t get me wrong. Things were not perfect in my home in “Salvation Springs.” These were formative years, and not always in a positive way.

But there were many good things that happened there, too. And the 80s really were a magical time to be a child.

Stafford was the place where I went to school from kindergarten through fifth grade. It was where I made my first friends, learned to ride a bike, received my first communion, and welcomed three of my five younger siblings into the world. It was where I spent long summer days climbing trees and building forts and reading books and picking strawberries and visiting my cousins and my friends. It was where I spent winters tunneling through snow banks, sledding off the rock wall at the bottom of our hill (if you timed it perfectly, you could land on your feet in the street), and making cassette-tape recordings of my own made-up radio shows — preparation for a future career in media.

It was where the Christmases I remember so fondly happened. It was where I played with my favorite toys, watched my favorite shows, traded Garbage Pail Kids with my classmates on the playground, set up my first lemonade stand, sucked down Otter Pops on the front stoop, learned to love football (and the New York Football Giants) by watching Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks and Mark Bavaro and Phil Simms, and learned to fear the Soviet Union and be fascinated by current events by watching the NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw every evening with my dad.

It was a town I knew like the back of my hand, because everything I did from church to school to the library I borrowed so many books from were all within walking distance of my front door.

It was a simpler, slower, more sane time.

And it’s gone forever.

During my year in New England, before leaving it behind, frustrated but with a better understanding of myself, I discovered what should have been obvious in the first place: you can’t go back again. No matter how many times you slip off the I-84 and down memory lane, you can’t recapture the things that were.

“Out here, it's like I'm someone else, I thought that maybe I could find myself…”

The trees I used to climb every day have been cut down. The barn I used to play in has long-since been demolished. The school I spent five years learning in and playing on the playground of now stands, boarded up and fenced in, like an abandoned corpse; a set piece from the “Upside Down” of Stranger Things. They didn’t even bother to tear it down. It just stands there, a haunting monument to the past. When I look out over the crumbling asphalt lot where I used to have recess, I can still see where the swings and the jungle gym were, though no evidence remains. In the mornings, if I got there early enough, I’d have time to play before school. So I’d go to the swings, face down the street away from the playground, and grip the metal chains so tightly my knuckles would ache. I’d close my eyes and kick my feet and pump and pump until I went so high and so fast that I’d soar above the fence line, the wind whipping past my face, then open my eyes to see the sky as I fell back, or look down the sloping grass disappearing below me down the hill, and it felt like I was flying.

My old elementary school, called “The Borough School,” now abandoned and boarded up.

The relentless passage of time is a harsh reality.

In 1989, after my youngest sister was born, and a good chunk of our family had left Connecticut and moved back to Upstate New York, my parents decided to follow suit. They had been renting for years, saving for a house, and Connecticut real estate at the time was simply priced out of their reach. I was excited to go back, because in my very sheltered experience of the world, Binghamton — which had a population of about 53,000 at the time — was a “real city.” I always enjoyed going home to see my grandparents, not just because I loved them, but because the place felt exciting to me. My mom, when she realized it was really happening, just cried. She didn’t want to go back to her home town. I don’t think she explained it in any detail to my eleven-year-old self, and I’m not sure I ever asked again after that.

The next 14 years was kind of a blur. I never really fit in back in New York. Starting over in 6th grade with people I didn’t know was not easy. Instead of moving to Binghamton, we moved to Kirkwood, a rural little backwater on the Pennsylvania border about 20 minutes away where there was almost nobody and less than nothing to do. We had a beautiful yard, but I was getting too old to care much about playing outside like I used to. It mostly meant a lot of lawn mowing for me. I never really made friends, even playing football. Until I got my license and could drive into town and go to the movies or out to eat, I hated it there. Autonomy and access to this new thing called “the Internet” made me hate it slightly less.

It’s unsurprising that I almost literally leapt at the first chance I had to leave home. Just a couple of months shy of my 18th birthday, I moved to Irving, Texas, to attend a private Catholic high school run by the Legionaries of Christ, which turned out to be yet another Catholic cult. But I didn’t yet know how sick the Legion was, and my senior year of high school was one of the best years of my life despite that fact. It was the first time I made real friends — people who were fun to be around but who also shared my beliefs. People I still count as friends to this day. It was also the first time I fell head-over-heels in love.

I couldn’t have asked for more.

But a year goes by fast, and things were about to get more chaotic. Before I knew it, it was May of 1996, and I was graduating. With no job, no place to live, and no solid college plans, I had to leave Texas, my friends, and the girl I loved behind. I stayed in the Legionary orbit, and spent the summer working manual labor for money before heading off to do missionary work on an Indian reservation in Canada I joined up with the Legion’s “co-worker” program, took a quick but chaotic detour through discerning the priesthood in their seminary, and wound up teaching religion to junior high kids in one of their schools in Atlanta until I finally broke off my association with the Legion in early 1997. After working for six months repairing computers, I moved to Idaho for the summer with one of my high school buddies before going off to college in Ohio. When I graduated, I came very close to moving to Japan, only to change course at the last minute and move to Phoenix with friends, where I met my future wife. After 9/11, I moved back to New York, then finally moving to Virginia, shaking off my fear of commitment and chasing down a young woman who foolishly agreed to marry me in 2003.

My parents would move to Virginia shortly thereafter. (Totally by random coincidence, I spent a good bit of the time I devoted to working on an earlier draft of this post sitting in the Virginia townhouse they owned for most of the past two decades, right up until we bought it from them last year, remodeled and rented it out, and finally sold it just last week.)

My wife and I both suffer from wanderlust, but for different reasons. I’ve lived in too many places, keeping me from being too attached to anywhere while developing a taste for certain things from each; she grew up in just a couple places, both of which stifled her, leaving her desperate to get out. As a couple, we somehow manage to keep moving and moving and moving, always trying to capture and hold onto the elusive sense that “this place, at last, is home.”

Salvation Springs is An Idea, Not a Place

“You leave home, you move on and you do the best you can; I got lost in this whole world and forgot who I am…”

I’m grateful for my wife’s mix-up on the name of my hometown. “Salvation Springs” may not be a real place, but the idea of it has fermented into a useful understanding.

I thought by moving to New England in 2021, I could re-capture some of the lost and cherished innocence and joy from my childhood. More to the point, I thought I could give that to my own kids.

I thought I could give them streets where they could ride their bikes until dark and forests where they could climb trees and summers in the lakes or at the coast and fireflies in June and sledding in November, and that through all these things, they could share in a piece of the magic I remember through the gauzy, warm glow of nostalgia.

But life doesn’t work like that. My kids did not grow up where or when I did, and they are different people. You can’t just transplant your family to a place they were never from, never arrived at organically, and expect that they’ll take root. I had, for better or worse, a reason to grow up where I did. I had connections. I started out there. I had time to build friendships from the ground up. I had family for when those friendships were unavailable or insufficient.

My kids had just me and their mom and a bad case of wishful thinking. We felt like outsiders the entire time we lived in that small New Hampshire town. At least in a big city, you can feel comfortably lost in the anonymity of too many people, all of whom have an excuse for not knowing everyone else by their first name. When you’re in a small town and don’t know anyone, sometimes the feeling of isolation is even worse.

I tried to take my wife and kids to see the magic of Salvation Springs, and all they saw was a beat up house from the 1920s, in a yard overrun with weeds, in an old textile mill town whose glory days were far in the past — and were, if I’m being honest, even when I lived there. More to the point, they saw their dad holding on as tight to his old memories as he used to hold onto the chains of the swing set at the boarded up school at the top of the hill.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m becoming increasingly convinced that what makes a place special isn’t the place itself, but what you experience in that place, and how it transforms it in your eyes. It’s a case of BYOM - Bring Your Own Magic. It’s not stored up in the trees and the rocks and the shops and the streets. The aesthetic can certainly help, as can the natural energy of a place. But the rest is up to you. The thing is, it seems to be one of those situations that only works if you’re not working at it. You can only weave the spell of belonging if you’re not doing it intentionally. Awareness brings artifice, which stops the deep magic from doing its thing. The more you seek to force it, the more elusive it becomes. A place can only become truly lived-in when you stop thinking so much about being there.

It’s only when you’ve become comfortable enough to forget that you’re somewhere you didn’t used to be than you can ever really start to belong.

Finding Home

As I said, I move a lot. In the past seven years, I’ve lived, for at least a few months, in a total of nine different houses. Go back the full twenty two years since my wife and I started dating, and I’d need more than both hands and both feet to count the number of places.

I don’t actually like moving this much. It just sort of happens. Each time, it feels perfectly sensible based on the circumstances. But all I really want is a place we can call home for many years to come. A place where we can just sigh with contentment when we walk in the door, because it’s our vibe for our tribe. (Cheesy, I know, but a place has to fit your whole clan or it isn’t right.)

And now I’m starting to realize that the reason it hasn’t worked for us is that we’ve been doing it wrong, because we’re expecting to discover what can only be made. Every city we’ve visited, every road trip we’ve set out on, every stop we’ve made, we’d take the temperature, looking for the magic. “Could I live here? Could this, at last, be the one place we’ve been looking for?”

Coming to terms with the realization that “Salvation Springs” is just a fantasy is a thing I’m still working through. What I’ve learned already is that while some criteria are going to have to be met, no place on earth is going to scratch the itch the second we roll up.

I have fond memories of Connecticut, New York, Texas, Atlanta, Idaho, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, DC, Arizona, California, Wyoming, South Dakota, Tennessee, Florida, Utah, and more. For that matter, I have fond memories of Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, and much of Europe. Each of those fond memories is like a starter culture, a little spark that could, given time, effort, and vulnerability, be carefully nurtured into a flame. You have to be willing to open your heart up to a place to make it your own. You have to be willing to bloom where you’re planted.

In an interview I watched with the always-fascinating Eric Weinstein a few months back, he echoed the problem of “city chasing” while trying to find the thing you’re looking for:

In some sense I don’t feel like home unless I’m in a place of alienation.

It's sort of like, I've likened it to growing up in a de Chirico painting, some industrial landscape where you've abandoned everything. There's a child with a hoop running down the street. There's nothing.

[…]

Every place is over. And I mean that.

You can't move to New York and say it's happening in New York, it's going down in Austin. “No, you know, you're not getting it man! We're going to move to the Black Rock Desert. Burning Man’s gonna be 365!”

None of that’s true. No place is happening. There are things that are happening, but they're happening between people. Sometimes they're happening between people who have never actually met in person.

[..]

I think, in a weird way, I've come back after 37 years away. I was conceived in Laurel Canyon. I was born in what is now the Church of Scientology — it used to be Cedars of Lebanon — and I ran away from this place at 16 so hard and so fast I never thought I would be back.

Then I explored the world. I lived in places that I needed to. I went back to Philadelphia, which was my family's ancestral seat, to the extent that you can claim something as immigrants in the US. I went to Boston, which I thought was the center of academics and science. Moved to New York, which was hot for hedge funds — at least, it could support creativity and rule breaking. Moved out to San Francisco to do tech. Went to Jerusalem for two years, because it's the belly button of the universe. And I think I came back to LA not quite sure why I was here anymore.

What I think I've put together is: it's not happening anywhere, it's happening wherever you happen to be, and wherever you can make it happen. And there's no point in in city chasing. Right? Like, you know, something is pulling me towards Austin, somebody else is saying come to Montana, come to Miami. I think at this late stage in the game, I'm actually back home. I'm from this place. My son is the fifth generation now of Los Angelino in our family, which effectively never happens.

And you know, whether it's the flood from the dam that burst in Baldwin Hills or whether it's the ‘71 earthquake, or the Bel Aire fire, you know in some sense there was somebody from my family here for all of those things.

Eric says much I agree with. I’m admittedly jealous, though, of his sense of place. He is able to ground his rationale for coming back to Los Angeles on the fact that it has been his family’s home for generations. Not everyone has a generational connection to a place that’s viable. The economic wasteland that is Upstate New York certainly isn’t. That’s why I left in the first place. New Hampshire turned out not to be. Tucson, where my wife is from, isn’t.

Phoenix, weirdly, might be, though neither of us really wanted that. It’s very different than when I first arrived here 22 years ago, trying to figure out what my life was going to look like. It’s grown to become an incredibly cool city with a vibrant food and cultural scene, and no matter how many times I’ve tried to escape, it just keeps calling me back. I’ve moved to Phoenix six times and left five. This time, I think I’ve more or less given up fighting the siren’s song of this weird oasis in the desert. It isn’t perfect, but of everywhere we’ve been, it has the strongest combination of things we need and like. We still had friends here. We decided to hit the “undo” button on our mistake and move back.

Now, it’s up to us to provide the magic. To make a home.

We may never be good at this. We’re still restless, like a bone deep ache. We talk wistfully about the economic and cultural boom in Texas; the longstanding desire to live near the beach in San Diego; the beautiful mountains in Colorado; the misty, ancient forest allure of the Pacific Northwest, and so on. We’ve already been nomads for a decade longer than we wanted to be, and now our kids have moved more times than even I did when I was young. Their “Salvation Springs” was Manassas, Virginia, in the quaint four bedroom colonial where we actually stayed put for a whole six years. It’s the place they remember most fondly. It’s the place that feels most like home.

But it isn’t ours anymore, and just like me and the house on Fiske Ave., there’s no going back again. Not even if we bought the place. Whatever it is I was holding onto, it was a moment in time that has already passed. The boards and plaster, walls and floors and windows of a place may all still have the same shape, but they can no more retain the magic of those memories than a sieve can hold water.

There’s a Welsh word that comes closer to describing what I’ve written about here today than any term I’ve ever come across: Hiraeth. It means a deep longing for home, a haunting nostalgia, a yearning for something that feels so familiar, yet so irretrievably lost. It’s a beautiful word describing a complex emotion.

The homesickness may never fully abate, but it helps to recognize that the only home is the home we create. Eric Weinstein is right: “It's not happening anywhere, it's happening wherever you happen to be, and wherever you can make it happen.”

A place doesn’t make you. You make the place.