Home as Connection
A line, mathematicians tell us, is the distance between two points. A line joins; a line connects. A line takes us from one place to another, one destination to the next. But a line is not a one way street. We can go one way on it as easily as we can go the other. Like home. We can leave home, we can come back to home. Our home “line” runs both ways.
Home is a point, a point on a line. Actually, it’s many, many points on many, many lines. Millions, perhaps billions of lines run through the points we mark home, millions and billions of connections to other lines and to other lines in turn, millions and billions of permutations and variations on what we come to call home.
But we’re still on a line connecting.
Many years ago, I was traveling in southern Alberta, my destination Victoria, British Columbia, thousands of miles from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where I had begun. One night, I stopped in Lethbridge, a then little town south of Calgary. I had been there before. Several months earlier, I had spent an afternoon in Lethbridge with two couples, Patrick and Rosemary, and Dan and Ellen, who had befriended me after picking me up as I hitchhiked into town after a couple of weeks of backpacking in Waterton Lakes National Park. After dinner, Dan, Ellen, and I took our leave of Patrick and Rosemary and drove to the house they were renting west of town.
Dan and Ellen had chosen well. Their house, a charming white shuttered cottage with two bedrooms, sat on the top of the Continental Divide as it rumbled under Highway 2, the lonely stretch of road that travels from the cities of the southern Canadian heartland to Vancouver and the shores of the Pacific. Even though we were well into September, the days were still long enough that we arrived at the cottage in time to see the reddish yellow sun sink behind the hundreds of peaks arrayed along the western horizon. It was spectacular.
We had a pleasant evening, Dan, Ellen, and I, snacking and talking, discussing and contemplating together the puzzle of how the three of us ended up at this house on that night. What connections, what lines ran through the universe that occasioned our stumbling into each other, our gathering in this home?
Come morning, Dan and Ellen had to leave their mountain hideaway to drive back to Lethbridge for work. I traveled with Dan into town, then took my leave, setting my sights for Calgary and, subsequently, Banff National Park. I didn’t think I’d ever see them again.
On this night, this night some months later, after I had backpacked through Banff, then Jasper, out of the mountain autumn and into the mountain winter, and was now slowly making my way to Victoria to stay with some childhood friends who had moved to Canada two years before, however, I thought that I might. I had already bumped into Patrick at the bar of the hotel in which I was staying (Rosemary was traveling); why would I not see Dan and Ellen as well? Why wouldn’t the universe surprise me with them, too?
But when the next day I arrived at Dan and Ellen’s house, the tiny cottage hanging on the Continental Divide, the white shuttered cottage set among the mountains of the world, I saw nothing. The house was empty. No furniture, no dog, no Dan, no Ellen. Nothing. I was bummed. Outside of going back to Lethbridge and tracking down Patrick again, I had no way to contact them.
There was no way to connect.
As I journeyed on, however, heading into the misty darkness of the highway, I realized that, although I felt a little lost and lonely not seeing Dan and Ellen, it didn’t matter. I had had a lovely evening with them, truly a lovely evening. We had some wonderful conversations, conversations of depth, hope, and meaning. We laughed, too. I felt as if I had bonded with Dan and Ellen in a way I had not with Patrick and Rosemary. Not that I did not treasure Patrick and Rosemary; I did. But the connection was different. The lines intersected in richer ways, the homes blended more seamlessly.
Ironically, while I had actually seen Patrick, it was my connection with the people I did not see that remained strongest. Although with her maternal ways, ways that reminded me of my mother telling me that she would be waiting for me when I returned home from my travels, Rosemary was a window into home, Dan and Ellen were home. Stepping into their warm and cozy house on the crest of the divide, I felt as if I had walked into something more than me, something bigger than my emotional attachments, something anchored in existence itself.
I connected.
Recently, my thirty-one year old daughter told me how, at an autumnal gathering of friends at a cornstalk maze, she had been the only one who could start and maintain the campfire they built at the end of their time there. As everyone rested after negotiating the maze, the proprietor of the maze approached and dumped several logs into the group’s firepit, expecting, I guess, that a fire would somehow light up on its own.
Sixteen years of family camping had not been without its effects. Megan knew full well that logs do not catch into flame without some kindling, some gathering and coaxing of heat sufficient to ignite larger pieces of wood. She subsequently pulled together a load of twigs and paper, set it on the embers still hot from the last group of maze patrons, and voilὰ: a fire was born.
Megan hates camping. She loves being outside, but she does not care to sleep outside. She doesn’t wish to deal with insects, uncomfortable sleeping pads, inconvenient bathroom facilities, and lack of access to running water. But she knows how to build a fire. Through it all, through all those years of camping and hiking and sleeping in the mountain air, she absorbed the art of fire building. She connected. Though her memory of home, home as she experienced it in the mountain peaks, has its frustrations, she still connects to it.
A few years ago, I was riding the Metra train from my exurban home to downtown Chicago. As I seize every opportunity to read, I had brought a book to see me through the one hour ride. Many of my fellow passengers were not as zealous for the written word. Glancing to my left, I noticed a row of twenty-somethings, male and female, not talking, not listening, maybe not even seeing: they were all looking at their smartphones. Granted, it’s not my generation; I cannot fault them for being, as I was, creatures of their time, thoroughgoing inhabitants of their historical moment. Maybe they are connecting in more ways than I think. Maybe they treasure home as much as I do. Maybe they were looking forward to the upcoming Christmas holiday when they could go home, home to Mom and Dad and the homes in which they were raised.
Maybe they really wanted to connect. Don’t we all?
As I sat in the lobby of my local YMCA one afternoon, I heard a rather unusual noise coming from the entry door. A person with severe intellectual challenges had walked into the room. He couldn’t even talk; all he could do was grunt and moan. Though I felt immensely sad for him, I felt even sadder that he probably had great difficulty in connecting, in making himself part of the body politic. Who would want to take the time to try? Who would want to know him?
For one, his parents. Gently, his father guided him into the lobby, then to a chair while he consulted the attendants at the lobby desk. As his father stood at the desk, he called to his son constantly, encouraging, soothing, telling his son that he was fine, that he was OK, and that no harm would come to him, that no one could separate them. He reminded his son that as long as he, his father, was with him, his son was at home, safe, secure, buried in love and affection. And nothing would ever change that. Wherever his son might go and whoever he might become, he would always be at home. He would always be connected to his dad. He would always know and enjoy his care and embrace.
As I watched this young man, I thought about his connections, I thought about mine. I thought about how we are all connected in more ways than we think. I thought about how all of our lives, our lines are moving, blending, diverging, coalescing, and creating, together thrusting across the skein of the cosmos, together burrowing through the edges of what we can know. Our lines live, and our lines die. But the connections remain. Every connection is a glimmer, a glimmer of light, a flash of hope, a hope that, in the end, we all share a home. Sure, we all have our separate homes, our individual joys and dreams, but we also have, whether it is in the mountains of Canada or the lobby of the YMCA, a connection, a connection not just to our home, but to all home.
We will always be connected to the lines, the lines of home.
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