Home is just a dream that some among us are still searching for

By David McElroy · February 20, 2020

As I got into my car after work Thursday, I felt a vague sense of unease. Something felt wrong. But what was it?

There was something wrong. Something was missing.

I went through a mental checklist, but there was nothing obvious. I wasn’t especially hungry or thirsty. There was no pressing need that I was overlooking. But I felt a wave of crushing emotion and then a thought hit me.

“I want to go Home.”

As the waves of emotions rushed over me, I knew what was going on. I wasn’t feeling a sudden need to go to the house where I live. I was filled with the crushing need for something which we all know in a deep part of our unconscious collective psyche.

Home isn’t just the place where we live. Home is a state of being in which we’re where we belong, among people who love us, where we fit and are accepted. To be Home is to experience the magic of knowing you are exactly where you need to be.

Classic human tales are full of myths about Home. In various forms of the “hero’s journey,” the protagonist has to leave Home to fulfill a mission, but the goal at the end always seems to be to find his way back Home. (Consider Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey,” for instance.)

I’m using “home” and “Home” as two different things. The normal way you use the word — with a lowercase “h” — is just the place you live. I’m using Home — with an uppercase “h” — to represent this bigger and more mythical concept.

Our culture is full of references to finding our way Home. In singer/songwriter Jason Isbell’s poignant 2013 song, “Cover Me Up,” he talks about the transformation in his life that brought him from addiction and pain to sobriety and family. In one of the verses, he sings:

But I sobered up and I swore off that stuff
Forever this time
And the old lover’s sing
“I thought it’d be me who helped him get home”
But home was a dream
One I’d never seen till you came along

He’s talking about Home in the way I mean it. He had always lived somewhere, but it wasn’t until he fell in love with Amanda Shires — the future wife for whom he changed his life — that he understood Home as something to long for. And that love and understanding changed him. Today, he and Shires are married and share a daughter and a music career in Nashville.

If you look at Christian music, it’s full of references to heaven being Home. It’s about longing for Home — such as the well-known old favorite from Pat Terry called “Home Where I Belong” — and I think that’s because the archetype of Home is so strong that we naturally connect it to a place of rest where everything is as it should be.

Home means different things to different people, often because of what’s missing from our lives.

Home might mean a place or time where we grew up which we can’t return to. It might refer to a lost parent or partner who we associate with life as it ought to be. It might even be a formative time in our lives that we mythologize.

When people ask me where I go at the end of the day, I call it home. We all know what that means. But for me, home isn’t Home.

I find myself aching to go Home. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know who waits for me there. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know much of anything.

But I know what it feels like. I know the security that waits there. I know the love and understanding and acceptance that fill the place. I haven’t ever been there — even as a child — but I yearn for it. I’m lost without it.

And that’s what I am missing tonight. I want all of the love and acceptance and warmth and peace that we associate with that place where we long to be.

I want to finally be Home.

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Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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