Lacking Least (or, Why There Are No Cardinals in Colorado)

About an hour outside of Boston, my bus from New York pulled off the pike for a rest stop.  I got out to stretch and resolutely not go into the gas station and buy any snacks (hell, I still had a sodium hangover from the Cheetos we’d eaten the night before).

            

As soon as I hit the air, I knew I was in Massachusetts.  I could smell it. 

            

The less sentimental among us would point out that what I was smelling was humidity and the green that comes with late spring on the East Coast.  Not surprisingly, I have very little time for less sentimental people.

            

Because to me, it smelled like Massachusetts.  And it smelled like home.

            

I was watching Garden State recently, which has taken on all sorts of new significance now that I’m actually out there exploring my own personal infinite abyss, and something struck me about Zach Braff’s ruminations about the idea of home.  It’s slipperier than you think when you’re a kid, like most of the essential, simple, and fundamental things you have to learn how to make sense of (love, grief, family, disappointment, insurance), and I found an odd period in my mid-twenties when I came to realize that my parents’ house was no longer properly home.  Instead, after some growing pains, my studio in Boston had become home, which I now gauge to be the place in which you miss the fewest things, people, or other places.  It’s the place where you lack the least.

            

I spent the first part of spring break this spring in Illinois with my best friend; in spite of Boston’s being home, I still consider myself to be “from” Illinois.  (Negotiating the language of origin, location, and allegiance is a bitch in this decade of my life.)  As a result, I’d had to go back to Boulder to hysterically research and write the papers I’d been putting off for weeks.

            

On Easter Sunday, I talked with the various members of my family on the phone, most of whom were in Brookline with my aunt. 

            

And that afternoon, I found myself very, very lacking.  In fact, the lack was pretty much incapacitating. 

            

I lacked that perfect, springtime Boston humidity, where it’s always a little too warm inside until you get fans going and even then you feel faintly sticky.  I lacked the obscene amount of food, some of which would be forcibly shoved into Tupperware for my lunch the following week.  I lacked the white wine buzz that inevitably comes from a quorum of my family members gathering in one place, and I lacked wheedling a sober family member (usually my dad) to borrow a car and drive me back to my apartment, where I’d mosey the last few steps from the curb into my building for a relaxing afternoon of silence after the familial white noise of people who generally talk too loud (myself included).  I lacked the friends to call for a leftovers potluck and a post-family vent.

            

I lacked my family, my friends, and my home, and I cried like a child for hours.

            

So much for my research.

            

If you had asked me five years ago what would be the top reasons I would move to a particular place, I’d instantaneously answer “job.”  A little further down the list might be “guy,” although I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself, without extreme embarrassment. I had thought of these things as being the constant, and the location was just window dressing.  The dream job anywhere is still the dream job, right?

           

That, however, was a hypothetical five years ago.  This currently is my life.  And so help me God, I want desperately to live it in Boston.

            

I, along with most of the people who know me, had thought that I would move west to Boulder and never look back.  Of all the places I would be ecstatically happy, Boulder seemed a likely candidate: fresh powder to ski on, creeks to swim in, and open spaces to bike across, gasping the thin air and trying not to pass out.  In theory, the foothills would be alive with the sound of my happiness.

            

In reality, not so much.

            

That afternoon, standing within earshot of the Pike and waiting to get back on the bus, I realized something for which I have been grateful ever since: I know what I’m willing to do to go home, because I know that the dream job will probably mean precisely jack shit if I don’t have my people there to toast it with. 

            

Boston, and my people in it, are my priority.  And in the ongoing existential crises of my twenties, a loud and ringing priority is a miraculous thing.  It is also a miraculous thing, as a lifelong type-A, to finally understand that being happy, that not lacking, is in most cases a much, much better way to be than mercenarily successful. 

            

Later that week in Boston, perched on one of my aunt’s stools in the kitchen, I heard a cardinal’s chirp from the trees outside, and it made my heart ache.  I’ve always considered them personal good luck charms, little signs of good from the universe.  I also realized in that moment that I hadn’t heard or seen a cardinal since moving West.  Technically, the northern cardinal inhabits a southeastern swath of Colorado, but I’m not so big on technicalities, especially when I feel like somebody’s trying to tell me something.

            

That something runs along the lines of head east.

            

And so, another nine months, and I will be headed back to cardinal country.