Where You Can Simply Be

Home, the place where you can simply be who you are . . . without explanation, without back story, without grinding out the details of your life to explain the now of things. . .

Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton is from my home town of Fairmont, West Virginia.  She and I grew up a couple of miles and a couple of years apart.  Her experience is not mine and vice versa.

But when my mother told me recently that Mary Lou and her family had been living in Fairmont for a number of years, having moved back from Texas, saying, in effect, in an interview in the local paper, that it was nice to be home, to be in the place where people leave you alone in the grocery store, I got it.

Nobody hounds me in public places for an autograph, but home as the place where you can be part of the background, where your presence is taken for granted, resonates, I think with us all.

We all have, at least some time in our lives, that yearning for fame, acclaim, fanfare, and notice, don’t we?  But if we stopped to think about it, that would wear rather thin after awhile.  Sometimes, it’s actually nice not to be noticed, not to be on stage, not to have to worry about whether the hair is combed, the smile on, where our absence is more noteworthy than our presence.

Today, that’s the place that feels like home.