This morning, as I rebuild our rotten deck in the backyard, a male robin glides by with a beak full of dried grass, and flaps up to his mate in the crook of an old pear tree. She’s preening in the nest — getting ready. The birds have just returned to Chicagoland from a winter feeding ground somewhere south. An internal geomagnetic compass allows them to home their way back to their nesting place each spring. For birds, “home” is both verb and noun — both journey and destination.
The robins are fastidious architects. Even the aching whine of my miter saw can’t distract them from their work — from making a home again — which is never easy, whether you’re a feisty robin with some sticks and leaves, or a pretend carpenter with some planks and nails. We are both just trying to live in season and be good parents.
Our daughter, Abby, just graduated from college, and our son, Bennett, from high school, which is why I’m rebuilding the deck. We’re having a party to celebrate — endings and beginnings, new departures and arrivals. But my hope is that when the kids migrate to new habitats in the fall, they will carry a sense of this home with them — even as they construct a new one. Because while they and their friends are all intensely focused on the future, on looking ahead, I now find myself looking back, on nearly 60 years of trying to remember the way home. So as Bennett begins his college career and Abby ends hers, I can’t help but look back at my own, and wonder what we might learn from one another.
On a hot August day in 1979, I moved from small-town Iowa into Burge Hall, or “The Zoo,” a dorm that housed 1,000 freshmen at the University of Iowa. My “cage” was a 10-by-12-foot room, where I would live with two other bewildered teenagers. As my parents and I pulled boxes out of our car, I remember two songs drifting from the open windows of the dorms: “Imagine,” by John Lennon, and “Lonesome Loser,” by the Little River Band. That day, in my uncertainty, I identified more with the latter. The two films everyone was watching then were “Apocalypse Now,” a gruesome critique of the Vietnam War, and “Animal House,” a raunchy fraternity romp. Like many freshmen, my social life overwhelmed my social conscience, so I was in “Animal House” mode.
The first month of college was one long, staggering party full of desire and confusion: This was college? I didn’t feel at home there, but adjusted. My roommates and I, and a few other guys down the hall, happily bonded through our shared but unspoken sense of displacement. Every night at 6:30 p.m. the flipping whir of a helicopter, Alan Alda’s familiar voice and the laugh track from “M*A*S*H” seeped through our half-closed door. We all comfortably sprawled on the floor around our 10-inch TV screen for 30 minutes before heading to the all-you-can-eat cafeteria, and the huge steaming silver vats of mashed potatoes and chicken-fried steak and buttered carrots. There were fewer choices then. No panini or stir-fry stations. Two kinds of coffee: regular and decaf. No shade-grown Sumatra with chocolate notes. And, after dinner, two kinds of beer: regular and light. No hoppy IPAs with a citrus finish.
There were no computers or smartphones. We plunked away on typewriters that had arms and bells. For mistakes: Wite-Out and retyping. We snaked the phone cord under the door to get some privacy in the hallway when we called our parents “long distance” –– on Sunday after 5 p.m., when rates were low. Given the 40 cents per-minute rate, there was no time for chitchat. The only conversation I remember that fall was regarding my first-ever C — on a paper in World Politics. Mom: “Don’t worry, you’re just starting out. College isn’t easy.” Me: “Thanks, Mom. I agree.” Dad: “Will this affect your Pell Grant?” Me: “No, everything is fine.” My freshman year I said that a lot: “Everything is fine.” But it wasn’t always, so I would return home — to be restored by my parents’ love.
My last visit home during college was in April of my senior year. I wanted my parents’ opinion on what to do next. I’d been offered a high school teaching job, but had also been accepted into a graduate program in creative writing. After a long discussion, their advice boiled down to this: 1. Be thankful that you’ve got options. 2. Follow what you love, and trust it will lead you where you need to go.
I had no idea, at the time, that this generic bit of advice would serve me so well for so long: Try to live in gratitude and with passion. If you do that, then the journey is home.
Tom Montgomery Fate, author of the nature memoir “Cabin Fever,” is a professor of English at the College of DuPage.