When Does It Become “Home”?

Dearest Rachel –

I suppose I really need to do breakfast more often in the dining room. If nothing else, it helps me with portion control; eating upstairs in the Windjammer, with its buffet style layout, offers the temptation of going up for multiple helpings – and when combined with the urge to ‘get my money’s worth,’ leads far too easily to overconsumption. Which might be understandable if you didn’t want to miss out on a certain dish from one day to the next – the noon and evening meals change from day to day, in particular – but the breakfast spread is almost always the same. So I don’t have to try everything every morning; if I don’t get ‘my’ salmon, for instance, on a given morning, there’s always tomorrow morning, or the next.

Another thing about the dining room is that the tables are set close enough together that one can’t help but be involved in the discussions around one. It almost requires one to engage strangers in conversation. Now, I don’t say this because I like it, but because I know it would be a good thing for me to occasionally talk to other people; sometimes, one has to be thrown into such a situation, or one will never learn to deal with it.

For instance, some time back, I was taking my breakfast there, and got drawn into one conversation for the better part of thirty or forty minutes. Somewhere in amongst that discussion, I mentioned (roughly) where I was from, and, as the two of us began to make our way out, someone called out to us, inquiring as to which of us was from the Chicago area. It turned out that my new interlocutor was also from the suburbs (albeit a little further out from the city – in Geneva, to be precise), and was curious as to her proximity to me. Upon answering her question, I also noticed that she was keeping a journal of her travels, and I inquired as to how long she’d been doing this; not having seen her before, I assumed that she just joined us in the recent turnaround port – that being Brisbane at that point.

I was mildly surprised, and somewhat embarrassed, to realize that she was one of the 700 ‘niners,’ those that have been aboard since the beginning of the trip in Miami, and would be staying on until the ship returned to Miami in September. Then again, given how many of them there are, I can’t be expected to have met all of them – especially considering how much time I spend in my room (which is one more reason why I need to be in the dining room regularly in the first place).

She didn’t, however, seem terribly bothered by my mistaking her for someone new; after all, she hadn’t met me either, despite the fact that I’d been aboard for a months at that point, myself. Basically, the same rules regarding knowing any one individual out of such a crowd as this apply to her just as much as to me.

Interestingly, since then we’ve run across each other several times, on one shore excursion or another that coincide with the other’s choices. However, as she’s made connections with several other people more her age, I generally stay out of their way. No sense in this old man tagging along behind a group of thirty-somethings, after all.

But at the time, I was noticing her journal and was curious as to how she was recording this for her own future reference. At the time, while I’d been writing you as per usual, I was still trying to balance my other attempts to record the events of the day. To my surprise, she wasn’t recording more than a handful of notes for each day; rarely filling a page with impressions that weren’t even necessarily full sentences, let alone paragraphs or a full story. But to be fair, there had been plenty of days at that point where there hadn’t been much to relate; sea days, in particular, offer a very limited range of unique happenings, to be honest. So I saw no reason to fault her for that; actually, the fact that she was writing anything down was more than I would have been doing myself in those days (although I think the journal I used for the Asia trip in college also contains some notes from our first cruise to Alaska in 1999, now that I think of it – at which point, I would have been her current age, I guess)

Sorry, I seem to be rambling.

One of the subjects that came up in our discussion was the fact that, somewhere between Antarctica and Peru, she started to think of the ship as “home”; I wasn’t sure if it was just the ship in general, or her room in particular, but either way. That would have been after the better part of a month into the journey. At the time, while I didn’t say as much to her about it, I really didn’t find that an appealing prospect. I didn’t want to think of this place as “home,” myself. I didn’t want myself to get too comfortable here.

To be fair, I’m sure you’ve heard me slip a couple of times and refer to it as such, especially when I’m out and about in a city or port. And in that case, the ship is certainly more “home” – more comfortable, in any event – than these places which, for the most part, I’ve never seen in my life. On a relative measure, it is “home” by comparison or default.

But am I really at home here? Sure, there are things I’ve gotten quite used to – some I’m really going to miss once I’m off the ship in a mere week – but there’s just as much that I really want to either leave behind or get back to. George Carlin notwithstanding, there’s more to “home” than just your stuff.

There are the people; the friends and family I’ve left behind for all this time, that I really want to get back to, and see how they’re doing even as I fill them in on everything I’ve been up to. There’s the community that I’m a part of – and to a certain extent, responsible to for certain things – that I need to get back to, and vice versa. Oh, the internet can handle a lot of this, to be sure, but not everything; some duties just have to be handled in person. There are also questions I need to answer, and others that I ought to have answered, that would be best done face-to-face. It’s more than a question of things.

So, no, I don’t think I’ve ever felt completely at home here. And maybe it was this encounter that reminded me not to think of it as such. To be sure, maybe if I was to be living here for another four months yet, I’d let myself slide into that sensation more readily; three months just isn’t enough for me to allow myself such an attitude toward this place. Then again, it’s been long enough that I’ve actually tired of certain things…

…but I think that will be a topic for another letter, later on. For now, however, keep an eye on me, honey, and continue to wish me luck. I’m going to need it.