I have this theory about memories and moving. It goes like this: when you stay in one place as a kid, you're connected to your past in a way that people who moved around a lot aren't. You can walk past a park and say, "That's where we went sledding every winter," or "That's where Dan's brother knocked his own teeth out with a bottle rocket." You grow up with the same group of people: elementary school, middle school, high school, bachelor parties, first communions, whatever. Your parents are friends with the same people they went to school with. There's a web. When you're a kid, it's invisible. When you're a teenager, it's stifling. But when you're an adult, it's reassuring to know that you can, kind of, go back to the same old haunts. I know, I know: change is the only constant. But even when they rip out the bank where you opened your first account and replace it with an A&W, you can still remember the bank.
I moved five times before I turned thirteen. My dad worked for IBM, so we would relocate, stay in a place for a few years—three, three and a half—and then he would get promoted so we would pick up and move somewhere else. It was never just down the road: we moved from Toyko to Calgary, from Ottawa to Victoria. I went to five different schools before I started high school.
On paper, this is glamorous. "Oh, you lived in Japan. You were a child model. You rode elephants in Thailand and spent Christmas in Hawai'i. Must have been amazing." And I'm sure it was! I have mementos of those experiences, like a little Thai outfit that I will one day stuff my own child into, or a tee shirt from 1985 with a whole travel itinerary applied in iron-on felt letters down the back: Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia. But I don't actually remember much about that time in my life. I was too young, and everything was too transient. Nothing is truly foreign to a young kid, because everything is happening for the first time—there's no context that says, "whoa, this is unusual!" because every damn thing is out of context. Childhood is literally creating context. (Exhibit A: we took an infant to see the Chihuly exhibit at the ROM and I was blown away and he was like, "Oh, more colourful shapes, like the rest of the world.")
I don't remember the bedroom I had when I was ten. I don't remember my teacher. I don't remember what our dining room looked like, or if we had a basement, or what the bathrooms were like. I remember snippets: getting a rug in the shape of a teddy bear and setting up camp, lamp and all, in my closet in Calgary, only to be told it was a fire risk; leaving a Japanese lesson having learned the word for octopus (tako), and thinking, "I'm never going to need to know that one" (never thinking that one day I'd greedily eat takoyaki on ramen dates in my thirties); taking the bus to my first date in Victoria (I saw the Fran Drescher vehicle The Beautician and the Beast, with Little Frank); my sister's second birthday party at my grandparent's cottage; ice skating at the Calgary Olympic Stadium; sitting in the car and eating McDonald's pancakes before skating on the Rideau Canal, my newborn brother's bellybutton stump and how gross it was. I barely remember any friends; I remember a handful of moments, with vague sketches of buildings or people in the background. Without that constant reiteration of this-is-where-that-happened, memories don't stay. I sometimes think about what it would be like to show up at our house in Tokyo and ask to take a look around. Would I remember things then?
I don't know that my parents ever thought of any one place as their "forever home." They had both come from small southwestern Ontario towns; as a family, we never discussed going back to either of them as any kind of "homeland." My mother's parents had been living near the Bruce Peninsula for a few generations, but my father's parents had escaped post-war Poland with zero fucks given. We've never visited, never been in touch with family over there. That side vanished into the forward-thinking ether. Our nuclear family was our whole world, for most of my life: aunts and uncles and grandparents lived a flight or a ten-hour drive away. Every few years, friends and teachers and neighbours would be in the rearview mirror. Aside from my family, I don't know anyone who's known me since I was a kid. Even as the world was big, our web was small.
If you're up at all on your star signs, you might be familiar with the idea that Sagittarians are natural travelers. We yearn for the road, wanting to see the world, never feeling settled in one place, never wanting to. But what if that's forced upon you? Would it be as fun? As urgent? Frankly, I'm a terrible Sagittarius: I'm rarely optimistic, change bums me out, and extroversion makes me sweaty. But the travel thing has always made me curious. If I chose it, would I love it?
The driving force of my adulthood has been finding home. It propelled me into relationships, and made my biological clock deafening. It has been seeking the place where I feel most myself, most human, and finding that most everywhere comes up short. (As I write these words, it occurs to me that the geographical cure for whatever is wrong with me was never going to work, because feeling outside is an issue with my insides; but, certainly, a sense of being from somewhere in particular might have helped define some edges.) Being nomadic in my childhood, keen on escape in my teen years, and evicted in my thirties, has given some broad strokes of why this particular concept might have eluded me. And honestly, I don't know that I'll ever be "from somewhere;" Stratford is the closest, and it feels good to be back; I'm still keenly aware of the history people have with each other here, stretching back to pre-K and sometimes earlier.
My main memories of childhood are of airports and flights. I remember a sunrise over the cloud cover during a red-eye back from somewhere far. I remember TVs suspended above seats, every screen playing the same movie, cheap headphones given out by stewardesses. I remember the different music channels we would tune into, and how the children's channel would loop every 90 minutes; on a fifteen-hour flight between Chicago and Narita, you could hear Peter and the Wolf ten times. I remember the in-flight meals, delivered on greige plates, the excitement of getting a whole can of ginger ale to myself, the little fake salads and gravies that were not the right colour. I remember how loud the toilets were when they flushed, and how thrilling the moving sidewalks were. I get knocked sideways by sense memories, like the particular smell of a jetway, or of a hotel with a pool.
And it's not like I feel robbed of anything, because I'm sure the experiences I had were valuable and formative, if not exactly seared into my conscious understanding of myself. But I also wish that I knew where capital-H home is for me, truly. Is it Stratford, where I went to high school? I've moved back, and it feels a bit like I'm pretending at rootedness. Is it Sauble Beach, our seasonal home since forever, but only during the summer months? Is it any of the other places, or somewhere further back? Would my Polish great-aunties welcome me? (Doubtful, if their surly New World counterparts are any indication.) I feel most alive when I'm on the edge of a great wind, usually next to a large body of water, with all the ions in the air. I've never lived there, but I've felt that wind, and it feels like it unlocks part of me I didn't know existed. Can I live in a gust of wind? Can I bring my toddler and husband?
Once, during a move, a hotel clerk tried some small talk and asked me where I was from. I didn't understand the question—we were moving towns, so technically, we were homeless, but the idea of being "from somewhere" was also just not something I had internalized. "Toronto," I answered, even thought I hadn't been there in years, and didn't know anything about it; I had been born there, so I was from there, right? She peppered me with questions about what I liked to do in the city, and I stared at her, blank-faced, because I wasn't really from there at all. I wasn't from anywhere, in that moment. And that is something I remember.
