Many young men dream of adventure. Of faraway lands and exotic cities with ancient names. I did not. I dreamt of normalcy. The normalcy that comes from being rooted in a location; of a sense of belonging derived from permanent residence in one specific location on this globe. This residency need not possess ancient origins. A few generations whose sense of place was defined by a small town or even a city was, I thought as a young man, a concept of great significance. Its significance was most noticeable in my life in its absence.
I was raised much more transiently. A careful calculation finds that I attended no less than six different schools in at least as many cities between the time that I entered kindergarten and my last year of secondary school. I became accustomed to introducing myself at the start of the school year. I learned how to make new friends and how to leave old ones behind. I learned that certain customs and traditions transcend location. Playground rituals that are deemed unique and inventive by those who have never moved are often rather ubiquitous.
I took solace in the fact that each move gave me a chance to reinvent myself, to design a new persona that I would try on like a new coat at the start of the year. Inevitably, I would shed it before the trees shed their fall leaves. I did not realize then, as I do now, that our personalities are more fixed than that.
I dreamed of a tree house. Having read about them in books, I imagined that children who didn’t move all possessed one. I dreamed of the day when I would stop moving and . . . .
We moved for the final time at the end of my tenth grade year. I entered eleventh grade with excitement. Finally, I could put down roots and begin cultivating lifelong friendships. Two incidents stick out in my mind from the first days in this new home that assured I would not find the idyllic home that I was looking for.
First, I heard one of my eleventh grade classmates teased about something that had happened nine years earlier. The fact that two people had gone to school together for over nine years completely foreign to me. That fact that he was still being teased about it also seemed very pointless to me.
Second, I began to attend German class. Each student was required to study a second language. I chose German since I had studied it for two years while living there. Each day in class that first week, my peers would correct my pronunciation.
“That’s not how they say it in Germany,” they would tell me. Having lived in Frankfurt for the previous two years, I assured them that it was, in fact, how a German would say it. The benefit of hindsight has helped me to realize that they had assumed the accent and dialect of our teacher, who was from Berlin while I spoke as my Frankfurter teacher had taught me.
Although I would not graduate for another twenty-one months, in my mind I began to leave town that week. I chose a profession that ensured me of opportunities to travel, and I set about re-establishing a nomadic lifestyle. As Hamlet would say, I am “to the manner born.”