Boston doesn't ring like home. It's got that accent that makes me shake my head and smile but doesn't quite make me feel all warm and cozy. I once told my friend Sully, a full Red-Sox blooded Bostonian, that he sounded just like Ray Romano and he said, "Ah! I fackin hate that gwoy. He sounds like'a fackin ayss!" Whoops. Check...and...check. Don't mistake Baa-stonians with New Yoke-kers. I think he woulda knocked my teeth out if I was a little white man. Thankfully for me I was Korean and a girl. Little is relative and debatable.
I imagine this fall, wrapped in blankets and chili crock pots and the crisp autumn afternoons filled with the comforting sounds of football emitting from our television. I'll be sitting with Danny and the kids on this couch, twenty hours away from this Midwest place, my Springfield home, filled with these furnishings that will be packed in storage boxes or rearranged in a new crowded room, where I'll gaze at them, all there in their oversized cluttered glory and barely remembering, and perhaps half-lamenting, how they all used to fit a space I'll never see again. Back in September, I had to fill out a background check application where I had to list all of my addresses for the last seven years with no periods unaccounted for, and I couldn't remember the addresses of half the places I've lived. I had to rifle through old documents and bills to recall the once-upon-a-time addresses that used to be places I called home, at one time or another, and where I would lay my head down, night after night after night. I'd lay there and wonder, in every one of those temporary places, where our next station in life would take us. Now I know. There were nine addresses total for the last seven years. Springfield is nine. Boston will be ten.
But it's funny thinking of a far-away coastal city booming with sports crazies in caps and bustling students running around like they're about to up chuck the next brilliant revolution - and thinking, "This will be home." I say it, almost in question. This will be home? Boston? Beer chugging angry cheering baseball fanatics and weather resistant type people - those will be...my people? I think. I don't really know more than just my stereotypes. But I imagine a city of Sullys. That's enough to make me laugh right there. His hair was always a mess and he always had a story. I like those kind of people.
When we flew to Boston for the orientation back in February, I met a girl whose husband was an HBS student and mentioned that she had just returned from New Hampshire. "Did you fly?" I asked her, genuinely curious. She tried to politely hide her surprise at my stupidity. "Well. It's just an hour and a half drive away." Oh. I smiled. She smiled. I stirred my straw. We changed the subject. Okay, so not only am I not from Boston, I am also, oh yeah! - geographically dense. Like South American wild jungle dense. My geography skills mirror my navigation skills. Horrendous. Equivalent to that of a blindfolded first grader playing pin the arrow on the cardinal direction. Or a blindfolded first grader playing drive this car to the store without getting lost. Sometimes I just wish the North Pole was up and the South Pole was down and East and West would just fill in all the rest of the space in between. I think about the drive from Detroit to Flint and know no one in their right mind would ever hop a puddle jumper that distance unless they were very confused or half in the bag. Since I'm not drinking these days, I'm not privy to that excuse. I can only imagine the look I'd get at the Boston Logan International Airport, all posterously decked posh with my bags packed for a New Hampshire weekend getaway. I'd look at my boarding pass, weirdly confused: "The flight is only 19 minutes?! How can that be?!" And with his good-natured Bostonian courtesy some guy behind the ticket counter would be yelling: "Saam-wan gat this garl a faaa-ckin' map!" I'd be, like, completely the opposite of "wicked awesome." Definitely...not...awesome. I should just stick with the story that I'm from South Korea and let that be the explanation that fills in the blanks. "Oh, she's from (speaking quieter) Korea." Nodding heads. They understand now. She's actually not stupid.
Oh, but actually, I looked at Boston on Google maps and I was, indeed, shocked at how far north it was, er, is, on the East Coast. Did it get moved since I was in fifth grade? Why for thirty years have I thought that Boston was like, somewhere in the middle? I'll need to research my future home a bit more astutely. It reminds me of getting lost on foot my first day in Heidelberg and using our handheld Navigon to get me back home, pedestrian setting thank you very much, and that awful chirpy computerized lady voice repeating "make U-turn in 500 feet." Oh yes I did. Just u-turned it right there on those lovely cobblestone sidewalks, just to have her tell me to make another u-turn in 500 feet. Oh the woes of a new city and a terrible gut intinct. Or complete lack of.
A small part of me is hoping that I'll one day wake up with a strange inflection in my voice and know that Boston has gotten to me too, that I'll be able to call Sully up and say: "You were fackin right! And how 'bout those people who say Ay-pel?! How 'bout 'dem apples!" Well, I don't think it'll quite go down like that. If it does, I should give myself a trophy for the lamest attempt at injecting Boston jargon in an even lamer exchange of Boo-ya! Oh-no-she-didn't! dialogue. I'd have to pull out my Hammer pants and Roger-Rabbit it to the door of shame and please-stop-trying-so-hard.
I guess I'm just done resisting the culture of every place I've lived, either because I think I'm too good or not good enough. I'm done wearing my illusory t-shirt in every place I call home that announces: "I'm a tourist, oh yeah, and I also live here!" Maybe it's an accurate description. I can't lose my roots, my This-is-who-I-am. But really - is resisting where you are right now in life somehow a betrayal to where you're from, or even, of who you are? Or, is it just a sorry excuse to not embrace this moment as if real happiness only belongs to an unknown station of the future or is left stuck in a station of the past? "Be here now," I tell myself. Thinking of it this way, I might as well live it up in Springfield. Love my friendships here as much as I can. Love this Midwest place I call home today. The space and the yard and our family life here and the beautiful lack of profanity on these traffic-less streets. Just as I might as well live it up in Boston in all its overpriced East Coast beauty. Thoreau would tell me that it's a life worth living, regardless of how short or long I live it. He'd shout with enthusiasm - Live it up all the way! As though Boston will be the last place I call home. And in fact, when we inevitably move away from Boston a few years from now - that's exactly what I'll be saying.
(Note to self - I just looked up the distance from Detroit to Flint and it is only 66 miles. Much less than one and a half hours. I'll avoid that metaphor next time around and Google map a city that is appropriately distanced from Detroit.)
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