Posted by I wanted to circle back on the discussion I had with my friend about trying to build a connection to the motherland when it’s so physically (and even culturally) remote for the non-national. It should probably not surprise that just as I was thinking of the idea of living where you live, Rod Dreher, one of my favorite writers, pens a post about not living where you live:
One of the lessons the admiring American writer learned from his experience was that a traveler, which is to say an outsider, experiences the beauty of a place without having to deal with the pain of the everyday, because he can always leave. Paterniti did live in Guzman with his family for a time, so he was no mere tourist. But the vantage point his status as outsider gave him allowed him to see only what he wanted to see about life in Guzman, to project his own hopes and desires onto the little village.
But as Dreher succinctly puts it, the converse can also be true:
A funny thing about people: we often do not live where we live.
Here is a problem central to the experience of growing up in Pittsburgh or any region, really. When your experience of a particular place is tied up in family and when the centrality of that experience is also built around mundane things like going to high school and getting haircuts and grocery shopping and all the little things in life, it’s easy to overlook the greater scope of what a place can offer. All you might see is the negatives that the Frenchman in Dreher’s article sees.
I think of myself, having lunch with a friend in Paris, praising his city as a form of Arcadia, and having him say no, no, no, you don’t know what it’s like to live here. It’s not what you think, he said, then told me about the hardships that I, of course, could not see, because I was an outsider who wanted to see it as Arcadia.
The most difficult part of living in your hometown as an adult can be the pull of familial ties. For some those connections are comforting; for others, stifling. Those of my friends who went away to college often had trouble learning to live in Pittsburgh as adults. During school breaks, they turned back into teenagers as they were feted by their parents. In the same vein, it was a longer process for their parents to learn how to treat their children as adults. This isn’t abnormal; it’s just the way of things when the connection to your hometown is itself attenuated during those formative years of adulthood.
That’s okay. Sometimes a person’s calling takes them away from their hometown. Sometimes, as was the case for Dreher early in his career and detailed in his great book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, the only way to eventually reconcile with family is to get away from them for a time.
But I think it’s an important thing to consider when making an assessment of a region itself. My experience of Pittsburgh is different, not simply because I live here, but because I’ve worked to carve a life that involves but isn’t dominated by my family. They obviously have a place but neither do they fully color my judgment of the region. And if, for some reason, my parents ever moved away from Pittsburgh, I’d stay.
