There’s something about hometowns that makes the subject rather volatile in our minds. Those of us who have established hometowns wish they had moved around a bit during their youth and those who moved around wish that they had one place that they could, in a concrete fashion, call their hometown.
I was always squeezed between the above two viewpoints as my family and I moved around. Squeezed while being stretched thinner and thinner. As a child, I enjoyed moving to different places for the interesting new people, new cultures, and change of pace. I’ve seen India from 3 different cities and regions ranging from the most downtrodden to the most developed. I’ve been immersed in the culture of a thriving fishing-based town in Oman. I’ve lived across the United States and have seen first hand the variety of societies that exist here, ranging from New York to California. I have been to a lot of places, but I have never been to my hometown.
Sure, I was born at a particular location, but what’s a hometown that you can’t remember anything of? And sure, I’ve grown attached to a few of the locales I’ve inhabited over the years, but only so much as one can in a span of, at maximum, three years.
Moving around as much as I did, I learned not to overly sentimentalize any once place or person because there was always a temporal deadline for how long my family was going to stay in one place. My father was always finishing a residency or taking up a fellowship or moving to an underserved area to help hasten the immigrant naturalization process. We were always immigrants.
As much as it may seem that I am griping, I am not. Luckily, there was always a home, if not a hometown. There was always a family, and there was always happiness. As time passed and ever-newer homes were established, this is what helped me come to terms with the two viewpoints raised earlier in this article. To me, having a hometown was never really as important as having a home with all of the connotations of the word.
So what if I learned to bike in Vadodara, India but my first real accident was in Khasab, Oman? So what if my first crush and my first relationship took place halfway around the world from each other? And so what if my sister was born in Khasab but learned to speak in Bayonne, New Jersey? The family variable was constant throughout, and that was enough.
As I’ve been writing this, an annoying little rhyme has been dancing around in my head.
Hometowns are neat,
hometowns are fun,
but hometowns aren’t
for everyone.
I wouldn’t change anything for the world. Or for a hometown, for that matter.