To Build a Home

In his timeless novel The Brook Kerith, acclaimed Irish writer, George Moore, states that “man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” It is with these words in mind, and the fact that I now live thousands of miles and millions of cultural differences away from where I grew up, that I find myself wondering about what it means to call someplace home. Beginning medical school in Israel has forced me, for the first time, to try to create my niche in a location outside of the state of Michigan. I have only recently realized that growing up in metropolitan Detroit and attending the University of Michigan has enveloped me in a Great Lakes bubble. I have thus been shielded from the reality that most people, when they learn that I grew up in Detroit, immediately jump to some unsettling conclusions. If it is not immediately followed by a “Oh! Detroit Rock City, huh!?!” or a “Motor City, ay?!?” my divulgence of my hometown is consistently succeeded by an “Oooh, I’m sorry to hear that”. Despite the fact that these comments are usually the results of ignorant assumptions that everyone from Detroit lives on 8 mile (damn you Eminem!) and is afraid to leave his or her house for fear of being caught in a gang-related crossfire or an economic disaster, I am consistently caught off guard by the notion that most people do not see Detroit the way I do.
Growing up, I never really felt a burning desire to escape small-town suburbia and move on to bigger, better, and faster. However, part of me was always jealous of my peers who lived their fabulous lives in the fabulous fast lanes of the American urban centers; I secretly wondered what it would be like to move away and create a cosmopolitan, New York funky fresh version of myself. Yet, now that I have made the big move, living outside of Detroit has only strengthened my affection for the city. Living in Tel Aviv, where the sun always shines, the buses always run, and the people always complain, has made me appreciate temperate weather, private transportation, and the Midwestern twang more than I ever believed possible. Oh, how I ache for a Franklin Cider Mill doughnut and my Ugg boots! Now, when I think about my early years, I am overcome with tenderness for the Rouge River ravine where my friends and I carved our initials into a tree that had fallen over during one of our mysteriously soothing, Indian summer thunderstorms. I long for the strangely fulfilling pain that I felt on the days following the neighborhood-wide snowball fight that nearly always ended with someone sporting a mean shiner. I miss my quiet West Bloomfield subdivision, my local Starbucks barista, my family, my home.
I always questioned my peers who gave up their lives in the bustling concrete jungles of America and returned to Detroit. They bought homes in the same zip code as the houses in which they grew up and had children who would inevitably attend the same schools through which they had suffered. I was suspicious of their apparent lack of independence, their need to run home to mommy because the city was too loud. Yet, now I understand. Living abroad has taught me that we can strut down the big-city streets in our big-city clothes and our big-city attitudes all we want, but home is where you fell off your bike and skinned your knee on the way to best friend’s house, where you run into your kindergarten teacher at your local supermarket. At the end of an arduous journey, home is where you carved your name into a tree when you were twelve-years-old.