Can You Go Home Again?

I was in Ohio last weekend. Took little James to visit his grandparents (also, coincidentally, related to me).

Ohio is such a vastly different place than where live now:
-green expanses of yards surround the houses
-great shade trees cast shadows in the middle of the day
-it is quiet much of the time
-the houses are large, with many floors and lots of rooms
-you drive to go places
-the parks are the size of New York neighborhoods
-there are fewer people and they are all white
-there were political yard signs, and many revealed a rightward lean
-EVERYONE wears scarlet and gray on Ohio State game days

I felt alternately comfortable and confused all weekend.

This was the place where I had lived, from 10-18, come of age, gone to school, learned about my body and chased girls (or ran from them), mowed the lawn and washed the car. This was the vantage point from which I had come to see the rest of the world: from the protection of a leafy suburb, my needs cared for, so trouble-free that I was free to criticize--if not bite--the hands that met those needs.

It is a good place for a child to grow up.

It is also a place I wonder if I can ever go back to.

When I left Ohio to go "east" to college, I left a world that was beginning to feel oppressively provincial. I ended up going to two of the nation's finest academic institutions, where I received an education in cosmopolitan ideas: liberalism and human rights, fine culture and food, multiculturalism and globalization. I learned all of the most salient critiques of my nation, my government, my race, my gender, my sexual orientation, my class, my religion. I learned that to be white, heterosexual, upper-middle class, and Republican in a mostly-Christian midwestern suburb was to be part of what ails the world. I learned in my education that MY PURPOSE was to transform the world into a vision distinctly other than the one embodied by the place that raised me.

I settled in the big, liberal, diverse city.

Lauren Winner, in an article for Books and Culture a while back, reflects on the tension created by education. In her article, about an 18th century Presbyterian pastor whose Christian education at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) set him apart from his agrarian roots, she observes the perennial tension of education: how being shown the world through a broader lens makes your hometown look terribly unimportant, if not irrelevant. Education conveys upon us a new identity that contrasts with the old. It shows us that our obligations are to serve a wider world--to love the world and the ideas of human progress and development in such a way that the affection or love we had for our former world and people are to be sublimated to the larger and nobler loves.

Loving these newer, bigger ideals often breeds a contempt for the former, smaller ones. My hatred for my hometown was also a part of my education--unintended, for sure, but nevertheless part of the curriculum.

But hatred learned through a classroom education, it seems by this past visit, can't completely squeeze out the deeper affection, learned through years of positive experience, of a place and people that formed me.

James, what should we do for you? Where will be your place? Who will be your people?