Celebrate me home

It occurs to me on this most family-oriented of weeks that this will be the first Thanksgiving I will be apart from most of not only my kids but from my extended family as well. As great as our move to New York has been, it's a long way from home and it's tough to justify the time or expense of heading home for a long weekend.

In the last 10 years, we've moved three separate times. And although that's a drop in the bucket for many, it's a lot considering we didn't move at all in the first 20 years of marriage and family building. Needless to say, every time you move, you run the risk of diluting your concept of home. But you also stand the chance of being reminded how precious "home" is. 

I love what former MLB commissioner the late Bart Giamatti had to say about home in a conversation about baseball:

I've wondered why isn't home plate called fourth base? And then it came to me: Why not? Meditate on the name for a moment, "Home." Home is an English word that is virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and the accessibility and the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness. They cling to the word "house" or even "my house." Home is a concept, not a place.

There's much more but too much to share here. To read the whole quote you can get his book "Take Time for Paradise." 

It's home I miss. We're building a home here in New York but it's new, much different from the established and deeply rooted homes we have in Oklahoma surrounded by family and friends…the people who know us best, love us most and accept us without question. 

My feeling this week is identical to the goal of every baseball player who's ever played the game…the desire to go home.