Another piece in my series about the role of home in everyday American life. —Jim
Part of what makes going to college an adventure is the knowledge that you just don’t know where you’ll end up. Here’s one thing I was reasonably confident about when I left Long Island after I graduated from high school: I wouldn’t be coming back to the suburbs of New York where I spent most of my childhood. The city? Maybe. But by that point, I was enchanted by New England—its history, its rich intellectual life, its sense of scale that felt comfortable. By the time I finished my undergraduate degree, I felt more at home in Boston than in New York. I did my graduate work in Providence, a small city where I would have been happy to spend the rest of my life. But the choice was not entirely mine.
That was partially because I would have to go where work took me, and partially because I now had a partner with whom I wanted to share a location. We were both up for various academic jobs, though it quickly became clear that her prospects were better than mine. After a stint at Harvard, she landed a tenure-track job at Sarah Lawrence. I got a job of my own at Harvard, one without a long-term future. Eventually I took a position at a New York City private school that would ultimately educate three of our four children.
With our careers solidifying, my wife and I sought to buy a house. We were able to put down $10,000 savings—a 5% down payment—on a $200,000 property in 1995. It was a fixer-upper; a gift from my in-laws allowed us to pay contractors to do the fixing and upping. The house, which had a stylish post office address of Bronxville, was actually located in the balkanized city of Yonkers, and within walking distance of a commuter rail line into the city. We lived there for ten years. I won’t bore you with lots of details, but I will tell you what I remember most about that house. Each night before bed—I was the last to go to sleep—I would sit on the landing at the top of the stairs where our bedrooms were located and read until I got tired. There was nothing that made me feel more at ease: the solidity of that space, my sleeping wife and children, and the quiet that followed the clatter of shoes on the stairs, dishes in the kitchen, and Disney videos in the living room. There was a window on that landing that looked into our yard. Most late nights the view was black with darkness, except when the moon cast light on our little patch of ground, bounded by fences and a bend in the Bronx River. Such is the stuff (along with mowing lawns, backyard basketball games, and dinners on the side porch) from which homes are made.
But families have a way of forcing parents to reconsider their location. Four children was a tight fit in that house; more importantly, we had a learning-disabled child and our investigation of the local school system was discouraging. We had bought the place just as the great housing boom at the turn of the century kicked in; between 1995 and 2005 it tripled in value. Of course, anything we might buy to replace it had tripled as well. But we were able to trade our particularly desirable geographic location in Bronxville for a bigger house and a better school district in Hastings-on Hudson, one of the so-called river towns in southern Westchester. There was a bit of a scramble to find available homes in the town—we bought the place just as the market crested before its disastrous downturn, and ended up with a split-level ranch. I guess sometimes you do go home again, after a fashion.
We’ve now been living in Hastings-on-Hudson—the site of a 1778 skirmish during the American Revolution—for almost two decades. (Washington left these parts in 1781 to make a surprise attack at Yorktown, Virginia, where American independence would be won.) I particularly savor living alongside the “mighty mighty Hudson,” as I referred to it when my children were young, the great highway of early American history, and indeed have developed an interest in the upstate New York that I as a downstater had regarded with misguided disdain.
Hastings—I like the way its name connects it with the small town in England where William of Normandy made the last successful conquest of Britain in 1066—is now the place I’ve been longer than anywhere else. I drive past a graveyard every day, and have begun to think it might really be my final destination. In the meantime, the rhythms of small-town life are in full force: I nod at the local police chief at church; am on a first-name basis with my pharmacist; engage in conversation with the local resident with Asperger’s Syndrome at the town pool I attend with my son. With the passage of time, I become more and more of a homebody. It was with real trepidation that I accepted a scholar-in-residence position in Australia in 2015. I’m glad I made the trip, among other reasons for the opportunity to see a society at least as prosperous—and certainly better run—than my own. My education and work experiences have made me a relatively cosmopolitan American. But I can almost feel the borders of my life contracting, even as I began a new job that requires me to cross state lines into Connecticut each day. I can’t say my hardening provincialism bothers me much. Indeed, as I traverse a tight ambit of school, work, Starbucks and a handful of other locations in about a five-mile radius from my house, I’m beginning to find limits comforting.
“This land was made for you and me,” Woody Guthrie said, more in anger than comfort. Maybe it’s true. Temporarily.
Next: a final installment on the place we call home.