I
love New Jersey. I’m from New Jersey,
and you don’t have to be from New
Jersey to love it, but it sure helps. Don’t get me wrong, New Jersey is great, it’s got lots of great
stuff: the shore, beautiful parks and countryside, picturesque little towns,
wonderful shopping and restaurants, etc. But parts of it are less lovely: the industrial
wasteland along the Pulaski Skyway comes to mind. There are two reasons to love a place: it
moves you or you grew up there, and no one is moved by New Jersey.
But I don’t love it like I used to. I live in Toronto now, and I just recently travelled to New York and New Jersey (my hometown was pretty close to New York), and also to Paris and to my wife’s home city in Albania. But New Jersey felt almost as foreign to me as Paris and Albania. It’s not mine anymore. I lived and breathed New Jersey as kid, of course. When I left for college in Rochester, New York it hurt to be away from my homeland, I felt exiled from the source of my life. After I finished college I stayed in Rochester for years, but it was never home. Nothing can replace home, your real home.
But I don’t love it like I used to. I live in Toronto now, and I just recently travelled to New York and New Jersey (my hometown was pretty close to New York), and also to Paris and to my wife’s home city in Albania. But New Jersey felt almost as foreign to me as Paris and Albania. It’s not mine anymore. I lived and breathed New Jersey as kid, of course. When I left for college in Rochester, New York it hurt to be away from my homeland, I felt exiled from the source of my life. After I finished college I stayed in Rochester for years, but it was never home. Nothing can replace home, your real home.
But,
now, after all these years, New
Jersey is not my real home anymore. I have a wife and a small daughter and a life
and none of those things has anything to do with New Jersey.
My father was from New Jersey and his parents came there from
Switzerland, and I’m still from there and my brothers and my mother still actually
live there, and they still mean so much to me, but less so the place they live. And Toronto
is just the place I live. Canada is a
wonderful country, but it’s not my country.
Albania
was exotic and fascinating and strange.
And Paris was so beautiful, but I felt
there like a caveman at Buckingham
Palace. I know something about fine art and good
food, but a middle class kid from suburban New Jersey simply does not belong in such an
exquisitely beautiful place.
New Jersey will always be part
of me. It will always be the place of my
childhood, that sprawling, suburban chaos of highways, parking lots, roads
without sidewalks, malls, shopping plazas, apartment buildings, fast food
chains, working class neighborhoods, broken-down factories, warehouses. Someone once said that to really know a place
you must explore it on foot, but the real New Jersey can only be experienced through the
window of a moving car. Ride down Route
22 toward Newark
and study all the stores and houses and diners.
Breathe in the exhaust and the chemicals and the tired dreams of
suburban repose. This is where middle class hope has gone to die, or at least
to convalesce. But keep driving, if you
want to stay you must keep driving.
My
childhood is long gone, and that feeling of utter, unquestioned belonging is
gone now too. I will never feel that
feeling again. I envy people who live where
they grew up. There are many places I
may end up, and I there are many places I would probably love if I lived there,
but none of them will ever again really feel like home, like the place where I
belong, because now I don’t belong anywhere.
