Homebody

About once a month I have a long telephone conversation with my friend Ed. When I spoke with him last week, he’d just returned from three months in Spain and France. One of the first things that he did upon returning home was to book airline tickets for his next trip, this one to Mexico.

One of the reasons Ed and I have remained friends for over forty years is that we have much in common. We are the same age, we read the same books and have similar opinions about those books, we have the same political views, and we have the same recreational interests. Where we differ is that I have become a bit of homebody and Ed wants only to travel. I am content to sit on my own front porch to write, and Ed prefers his writing to be in coffee shops all around the world.

Ed speculated that he and I differ in this one respect because I moved frequently in my twenties and thirties, and he did not. I’d lived in Boston, San Francisco, Taipei, and a dozen other places before the age of forty. Ed, until a recent move to Bodega Bay, never lived more than thirty miles from his childhood home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Even though Bodega Bay is a small piece of oceanside paradise, Ed now needs to travel. I not so much.

For the last couple of years I have justified staying home because I need to care for an aging dog. Not wanting to ask anyone else to watch my deaf, hobbling, and nearly blind pet makes sense, but it does not explain why I lack a strong travel itch. Manyu and I talk about the places we will go after Jack dies. We also talk about moving back to Asia, and I think that that move will more than likely happen. Manyu has wanted to move back to her home side of the world for decades, and I currently am less than enamored with life in the United States.

My homebody tendencies have nothing to do with my house, nor with an attachment to the city of La Crosse. All I want is a stress-free base from which to write, exercise, and play. La Crosse serves this purpose well, but if Manyu and I relocate to Taiwan or Thailand, I’ll adjust and make a new home of wherever we wind up. The only question I have is whether I can live half a planet away from our daughter.