Stranger In My Native Land

Seven months ago, I moved back to Seattle after 24 years away.

You have to understand that this whole city is home, to me. In many ways, the place I live now is less home than other parts of the city, but still I have my childhood connections here. My parents sold my childhood home right after my wedding, more than a dozen years ago. And sometimes I find myself drifting about the question, "where is home, exactly?"

From the synagogue that my husband and I joined, and our son is growing up in, I drive westbound, past the avenue (in Seattle, that's a north-south road, with "streets" running east-west) that would take you to the synagogue I grew up at -- an avenue that feels more like home than most of the other roads I am driving on, though I rarely actually drive on it anymore.

Bridge I knew in high school, never knowing there is a
beautiful walking path underneath, which I now enjoy.

Continuing westbound takes me past some places becoming more familiar, including a café / bookstore that I have recently taken a liking to, and ultimately right past my high school. Now, memories are evoked as I pass by not only the school, but also places -- stores (all but one now closed, and that one moved across the street), into which we used to occasionally venture, or mostly climb behind to explore things high school students sometimes do. Some days, emotions that kept me from moving back to Seattle all those 24 years rise up -- and, if you are nearby and my car window is down, you might hear me laugh as I pass by, or you might hear me cry.

On westbound I go, past one of the first Thai restaurants I ate at, thirty years ago -- now there are gazillions in Seattle, and we have tried three in our neighborhood, with one repeater. The two other early Thai restaurants I went to regularly are gone.

Continuing from there, I cross into much less familiar territory, soon turning southward onto one of the main roads of my "new" neighborhood. I recognize the names of avenues and streets, but not the roads themselves. A mile down I will turn westward again, almost home. In this neighborhood, I took ballet as a kid (I was even in The Nutcracker one year); Mr. Darrah, the best taxi driver in the whole world, would pick me up at school and bring me to my lessons, or pick me up at lessons and drive me home. We didn't have a car when I was a kid, and as I got older I would ride the bus through this neighborhood, sometimes stopping for a movie at the cinema whose popcorn smells now waft through our kitchen window. The little bit of familiarity I have with this neighborhood -- parents of dear high school friends live a few blocks over, and a dear friend, may she rest in peace, lived just around the corner -- does not shake the deep feeling of unfamiliarity.

This is strange, to me, to drive every day down an unfamiliar road in the city I grew up in, to live in a neighborhood that I know and don’t know, and after seven months I’m not sure if it is me or the city who is the stranger.

Probably it is a little bit of both. The city has grown and changed in my absence: restaurants and stores have turned over, closed, been torn down completely (most of these changes I followed in my annual pilgrimages home). I am just discovering some places that existed, that indeed I was right on top of, all along. Businesses, start-ups, have popped up and down, some have boomed, the population has exploded. Seattle's Jewish population has soared. 

I am close to an anomaly, a native Seattleite, nearly everywhere I go -- and yet, I question my right to call myself a native, though clearly I am. I was born at Swedish hospital on First Hill; I lived the first 19 years and 10 months of my life on Capitol Hill; all of my primary education through high school, and some college credits, happened in the limits of the city; I even had grandparents who lived here! But I lived for eleven years in Ohio and Indiana, six in Philadelphia, five in New Hampshire, and two in Connecticut, not to mention three summers abroad.

So call me a stranger in my native land, sometimes more at home than I could possibly imagine, and sometimes lost in neighborhoods I know well. Sometimes I know the name of and have strong memories of a person I am encountering, but they don't have the same context for me as I have for them -- that in fact their context of me is either me as a child, or more often my parents and not me at all.

I am profoundly happy to be back, to have weekly time with my parents, to be finding my way in this city and its Jewish community, both of us having grown up in the time since I left. Even in those moments of strangerhood or nostalgia or both. Seattle continues to grow, much to the delight of my son, who will never be a native (all of the construction has slowed us down, more to watch with excitement than because of traffic redirections), and I hope I will, too -- in and with my native city.