Pamela Louderback, Day 50

Being an army brat, I have never really had a 'place' to call home.  My family is from northeastern Pennsylvania, I was born in Frederick, Maryland and we moved - every 18 to 24 months.  I've lived in a multitude of states, a number of military bases, and even spent time living in some foreign countries.  So, for me a sense of 'home' or of 'culture' has always been a concept that is complex and difficult to grasp. 

The sense of things coming home is related to the sense that in our culture 'home' is a word that had no meaning without 'away' -- an especially poignant concept for those in Ireland (Flight of the Earls, Cromwell's Irish campaign of West Indies slavery, the Great Famine).  The sense of belonging to a place has often been, in modern Irish culture, in direct proportion to one's distance from it: the further away 'home' is, the larger it looms.  Home was not the place you were living in , but whatever was least like it.

Even in traditional Irish culture, there is no easy sense of 'home' as a natural, uncomplicated state of grace, as something that can be taken for granted.  The great sean nos singer Joe Heaney used to sing a traditional song called Peigin is Peadar.  He would preface it with a story.  Following is a version of that story.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did when first I heard of it. 

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A poor man is six months married when his wife falls pregnant.  She tells him that, with a child coming, he will have to go away and earn some money.  He gets work with a farmer 20 miles away, and agrees to stay for seven years.  At the end of the seven years, he has forgotten his home, and stays another seven.  And at the end of that time, he stays another seven.

After 21 years, he remembers that he has a home 20 miles away, but has forgotten that when he left his wife was expecting a child.  He tells the farmer's wife that he is leaving to go home.  She bake shim a cake to take with him, while her husband offers him a choice.  Either he can have his wages for the 21 years, or he can have 'three advices', one for every seven years he spent with them.  The man chooses the advices: whatever way the road is, never take the short cut; never sleep a night in a house where there is an old man married to ayoung woman; never do anything at night you'd be sorry for next morning. 

He leaves, and passing a lake, he sees a short-cut.  He takes it but remembers the first advice and turns back.  Later he learns that two robbers have killed a man walking on that short-cut.  He arrives at a house and, looking in the door, sees a young woman serving supper to an old man.  They offer him a bed for the night, but he sleeps in the barn instead.  At midnight, a young man calls to the house, and he and the young woman murder the old man.  In the morning, the man reaches home and finds his wife in bed with a bearded man.  He reaches behind the door for the hatchet they always kept there, and is about to kill them both when he thinks of the third advice.  He asks his wife who the man is and is told that it is his son, born three months after he left.  They cut the cake for breakfast and inside find his wages for 21 years labor.

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Such stories are as old as The Odyssey, but they were still being sung by a generation in Ireland that is only now passing on.  They remind us that 'home' is not, in the experience of ordinary people throughout history, just a familiar place, something to be taken for granted.  It is something that has to be worked for and achieved, a goal that can be, as Fintan O'Toole (well known commentator from Ireland ) explains "reached only by circumnavigating, with help and luck, ferocious dangers, unpredictablle treacheries both outside yourself and within your own heart.  And you need to be armed with advices, with warnings and incantations that form invisible threads for you to follow".  The advises that we hope will lead us safe home are what we call a culture. 

One of the things that culture reminds us of is that home is much more than a name we give to a dwelling place.  It is also a whole set of connections and affections, the web of mutual recognition that we spin around ourselves and that gives us a place in the world.  Older languages tend to contain this idea within themselves.  In Irish, the terms sa mbaile and sa bhaile, the equivalents of the English concept at home, are never used in the narrow sense of home as dwelling.  They imply, instead, that wider sense of a place in the world, a feeling of belonging that is buried deep within the word's meaning -- no matter where one might find ones' self geographically.