HOME: A PLACE TO GO OUT FROM, COME BACK TO

In rural America, Memorial Day usually means going back home, specifically to cemeteries where loved ones are buried. It is a homecoming that includes those who are living and those who have gone on but still remembered. Sometimes there are picnics right under the big elm which shades the graves of Uncle 'Lige, Aunt Polly, and a host of aunts, uncles and cousins. It is a celebration of life and death and continuity.

Maybe a key word here is home. Traditionally we think of home as the place we lived for many years or the place where we live now. If we think of our time here on earth as only a temporary pause while we so live to inherit another abode, that Home is spelled with a capital H.

On the present page of history, our earthly home has been described as a place where you hang your hat. That being so, a lot of hats are on the ground. Well, maybe not. If these persons don't own a nail on a wall, they probably don't own a hat to hang there.

Again, home has been described as a place where if you come back to they have to take you in. Not any more. Sometimes one finds his packed clothes on the front porch and the doors locked. There are restraining orders, too, that say, "Don't come near here anymore or you'll land in jail."

Some say home is where the heart is. This is a little vague. Sometimes the heart may be in the Highlands, the Grassy Meadows, or on the Bounding Main with no thought of a structure over head or a warm stove in winter. It's just a geographical location.

With all the homeless roaming the big city streets, sometimes I think one's home can be defined as only our skin. We just live within our skin. That's about the lowest definition of home ownership. Our deeds? Birth certificates I suppose.

When we get old enough to think in concepts we are presented with that of The American Dream. I can't seem to find a definitive explanation of that concept. Is it to own a home, have a family, a job and pursue happiness?

Home does seem the principal ingredient of this Dream, a house of walls and floors and roof that is owned. We (the government) made so many bumbling mistakes with public housing. If outright grants had been given for individual homes, no matter how humble, such grantees would have a "piece of the action" as they say and not just be living in their skins, roaming like Bedouins, but unlike Bedouins, no camels or sheep to sustain life.

We (the government) can't just give everyone a home lest they come to expect it generation after generation like the Welfare Trap, but those we do probably won't burn it down in a fit of rage.

The Christian movement of Habitat is a move in the right direction, but it is awfully slow.

If that home, family, job, pursuit of happiness is the order of The Dream, it has become skewed in some places. In a lot of cases it is family (no in-home father maybe) then a home or house if it can be managed, if not, the government will try. And if the government fails? Get mad.

Perhaps all the Think Tanks should have a mutual conference post haste. Surely someone, somewhere, somehow can get this "thing" back on track. But then up pops the question, "What is the Track?"

For me home (an owned shelter) seems basic to The Track, The Dream. It is a fixed place to go out from to help keep "the system" moving along orderly, and to come back to rest, receive physical, mental and spiritual strength to go out from again.

A home, one you worked for or are working for, or even been given, is a luxury to be cared for, kept up, passed on to someone else who might otherwise be living only in the house of his skin.

A tremendous load of guilt rides on the shoulders of some homeowners who are constantly being bombarded with TV pictures of the pitiful plight of the homeless. Those who stretched, scraped and scrabbled up through the Depression Years to latch onto a home can slough off this guilt rather handily, but they, remembering how it was, may be the first to reach out a helping hand to those who seem to be coming up with reasonable proposals to solve this 20th century problem.

I thought long about this matter of homes as I sat under the shade of huge maple trees and read the names on the nearby stones Stephen Bell, Josephine Bell, Frank Bell, Wilson Bell, Myrtle Bell, etc. etc. I think they all so lived as to finally slough off the last homes of their skins and go on to the capital H Home.

REJOICE!