Looking For A Home

...Everywhere I go?

There’s a song by the Boston band Three Colors, recorded in early 1988, called “Looking For A Home,” that I have never been able to get out of my head. This is all the more impressive for the fact that it was never released. The fact that, 37 years after it was demo’d, I could recite the entire second verse to its composer last weekend suggests that it connected with me not just musically but thematically.

Fortunately for all of you, I found that demo on cassette, digitized it, and got permission from the artist(s) to share it.

As you can hopefully hear, “Looking For A Home” wears its sentiment on its sleeve. The lyrics are literal. When the composer, Hub Moore, sings about how he loves “Peggy’s place in the summertime,” there’s no metaphor, no hidden intent: he is singing about places in Upstate New York and Martha’s Vineyard, how they’re “looking so inviting” that he wants to “get it down in writing” and “move in today and live.” But he doesn’t make these places home, or he can’t, because for reasons unstated, he’s not there yet in life. He appears to be still searching, still moving, still finding his way as a young man. Maybe he doesn’t have the money, or maybe he is still hoping to making a living from his music so he can get the money, or maybe he is still getting to see at least some parts of the western world by gigging with his band so it’s a decision for the future. Either way, the emphasis in the song is very much on the quest, the yearning, the “looking” for a home.

I have often felt that way. Like most of us, I enjoy my creature comforts and the familiarity of my own environment, the warmth of my own bed, of knowing where to find the coffee pot and the kitchen utensils and the stove so that I can take pride in cooking, the same way I do my library and record collection and musical instruments and bicycle. But perhaps more than most I am also inherently restless, constantly on the go. I yearn for exploration and new pastures, not just creatively but physically too. I love nothing more than a road trip, the offer of friend’s bed or couch to spend an evening together; I don’t frown on a cheap hotel bed during a stopover, appreciate the simplicity of a backpack and a one-man tent, and adore the astonishment at what might lie around the corner in a near or far distant part of the globe. Traveling light in 2016, finally getting to see the planet from eye level, I felt like I could make just about every place we visited my home, at least for a trial year.

But as of yet, that has not happened. Almost a year ago, my partner Paula and I moved into a home together. We signed a two-year lease on a relatively anonymous split-level property in the town of Hurley, just up the road from our previous separate homes in Kingston, the latter of which as I summarize to people who don’t know it is “two hours north of New York City, the Gateway city to the Catskills mountains, and the original State capital from the Revolutionary era, which means it has history…” Old Hurley has arguably even more of that history: on its single road of preserved stone houses, you can find several plaques - by the tree where was hung a British spy, on the building that served as the temporary State capital when the British burned down Kingston in 1778, and the corner house where George Washington stayed when given an official reception after the Revolutionary War was won, in 1782.

There's a plaque for that: Historic Hurley

My new home is not one of these stone houses. It is about thirty years old, one of maybe a hundred or so of mostly modest size in a suburban enclave (an expression I never expected to use in the context of my own residence!), hidden between the two main roads out of Kingston towards Hurley. But more than any of that, this particular house is a home that finally fits my needs and desires, my constraints and limitations alike, a home with just the right amount of space, just the right amount of garden, just the right number of stairs, just the right number of rooms – plus a 500 square foot music/work room with a screen door onto a garden that has just the right amount of green. It is, to borrow the British magazine title and annual, my Ideal Home.

This winter, only a few months after moving in, I temporarily moved out. A sudden trip to the UK as my mother’s long life journey reached a rapid conclusion turned into ten solid weeks as I took on the responsibility of executing her will. Fortunately, this coincided with the offer of a home bed in London, one I understandably seized with open arms to provide respite from the funeral plans and beyond. Plus, my mother may have chosen to spend her last years in Beverley, Yorkshire, where I was born and which is therefore me official hometown, but London is where I grew up, where I came of age, where I came to be boy about town. London always feels like home. (The same is true of New York City, the place that most felt like the home I was always meant to have and indeed for a number of years, a subject for another post.)

By the end of the ten weeks, I felt like I had three homes – the one in Beverley, which I finally shut the door on on April 2^nd, intending not to return should all proceed as planned with the house sale; the friend’s place in London, which I was encouraged to keep the key for in the hope that my home team, Crystal Palace would make the FA Cup Final for which I cheekily booked a “return” flight to coincide;¹ and of course, the home I was actually paying for in Hurley with my love, the Ideal Home, in the country I have called home for coming on close to four decades, a country I might not have chosen to spend these decades had it not been for the band Three Colors, as mentioned up top.

A lot happened back in that adoptive home country of the USA during my ten-week absence, some of it very close to home, which Paula wrote about on a Facebook post, and so as not to add to the word length here and also because there’s no way I can summarize it any more powerfully, you are welcome to read here. But a lot more happened that had nothing to do with our personal physical health and everything to do with the health of the country: the second Trump Presidency.

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Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, posts at least twice a week. You can support this page and its posts with a free or paid subscription. Thank you.

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Damn. There. I said it. The name I don’t like to mention, not because I hide from facts or want to shield from the truth, but because I don’t want to give him the oxygen, I hate awarding him the attention he craves – a mistake made by the media of all stripes (i.e. from news to comedy) repeatedly this past decade, a mistake for which we are all paying the price, including those who fell for the attention craving mania and voted for him. So pervasive is his odious presence that I even had to shut down a conversation about what the guests were at least calling the “horrible” man at my mother’s life celebration in Beverley – in the pub opposite the house I was born in – for exactly that reason: I flatly will not let him run nor ruin my life, let alone flaunt his dark cloud of misanthropy and megalomania over my mother’s memory.

Nonetheless, during those ten weeks in the UK, I found myself pushed to engage in conversations regardless. And every time I did so I felt my conflicted loyalties: for all that I wanted to get home, to my ideal home, to be there with and support my partner, to be reunited with the kitchen and the library and the music room and the rest, I did not want to return home to a country that felt like it was as far from my ideal home as a founding – the founding? – democracy could ever get, and somehow only on its path to getting worse yet. I had to ask this question of myself: if your home country lets you down like this, is it really home anymore?

And you may know us by our yard sign.

They say that travel broadens the mind. It does, and here are some of the things you learn if you travel enough and keep that mind open to learning, though you can also learn them at home if you are curious and like to study:

1) Borders are amorphous. They change continually, shifting and realigning and merging and breaking away infinitely faster than the continents that did likewise and are still doing so right now if we were able to slow down enough to think about it.

2) Humans are migratory creatures. We are all immigrants, except for the very few in that part of Africa who can trace their ancestry back all the way to the beginning.

3) Humanity is violent. As a species, we don’t just migrate, we conquer. We project our spiritual or religious beliefs upon other civilizations that we then claim ownership of on behalf of spurious countries that don’t logically exist. We have proven ourselves exceptionally cruel and malicious and capable of sadistic torture in a manner that makes the cat playing with its captured mouse seem positively charitable by comparison, and I am not just talking about the Romans, or Genghis Khan, or Ivan the Terrible, but the Spanish in South America, the British in Jamaica and beyond, the Americans during Jim Crow, the Russians in Ukraine right now, the Syrians within their own borders this last decade-plus. We are invested with unprecedented knowledge and skill and capacity, us humans, and we have historically wasted it on violence. Sure, we are capable of compassion and selflessness and empathy and great art too, but when that collective “we” vote for tyrants and bullies, for criminal charlatans whose snake-oil pitch should be recognizable and repulsive from a mile way, for those who take glee in other’s misfortune, for those who sanction sending masked enforcers to spirit people off our city streets and send them to undisclosed locations that are turning out to be torture centers in other countries, when we willingly vote for those who announce their own lack of desire for democracy and quest for kingdom, you find yourself second guessing yourself.

4) Just like national borders, democracies collapse. Civil wars happen. Fascists take over. Sometimes all of this happens and the country returns to democracy, stronger than before: witness Spain in just the last hundred years. Sometimes all of this happens in reverse. Sometimes the countries we want to visit suddenly become unsafe, due to invasion (Ukraine) or civil war (Syria) or dictatorship (Myanmar). Frequently the countries we do visit are only just emerging from their own civil wars: think Rwanda, Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia, and an other number of current global hotspots.

And if you know even some of the above, you may feel like I do, that your nationality is but a construct. Nonetheless it is a club which you are, all the same, forced to represent. You are, in the eyes of the world, the law, and the eager person in India whose default opening question – asked in an inquisitive, excited manner, rather than the potentially prejudiced one if the roles were reversed, is always “Where are you from?” - whatever it says on your passport.

India at its most inviting. We do well to return that love. Full “Behind The Image” about this photograph from 2016 here.

Those of us who have two of them only get to double up on the fragility that it represents. I could legally live in the UK right now, no questions asked and none needed to be answered any more about the nightmare happening in the USA. (And indeed, while I was in the UK, my younger son, who also has both passports, called asking if he could move there, and my older one, who does not, started the process of acquiring one.) But then I look at the local elections in the UK this past week, the steady stream of voters embracing the same reactionary, racist and what I would call dangerously revolutionary politics of the far right as in the USA, and acknowledge that there is nowhere to run (baby), nowhere to hide. I left the UK in 1987, in large part because I couldn’t abide a third term of Thatcherism. I can’t keep running all my life.

Home, then, is not just where you make it, but what you make of it. The US homeland that I returned to at the start of April after those ten weeks in my UK homeland is still home. The streets did not change in my absence. The shops remain the same, the bars and the clubs and the parks and the rail trail. People are still polite to each other in general, as per my immigration officer, and the neighbors in my new neighborhood still smile at each other and say hello as they walk their dogs or with their partners, without talking politics.

Interestingly, and I do think it says something about the mentality of the hard-core MAGA voters, as opposed to those more “casual” Trump voters or just loyal Republican voters who may already be regretting their decision, the four Trump flags that were flying in our 100-home ‘hood before the election are still flying. The rest of us, those of us whose pro-Harris, pro-diversity yard signs outnumbered them throughout (and I also see a pronounced difference between a yard sign and a flag), can only wonder what it will take for these MAGA types to question their loyalty – but I guess if it’s not the inflation, the recession, and the decline in their retirement funds, then it’s clearly not going to be the secret arrests, the deportations, the imprisonments in other countries, nor the dismantling of democratic governmental institutions by unelected billionaires, nor the attacks on educational institutions that are the envy of the world. Maybe they too are determined to burn this country to the ground, and with it the fragile international partnerships the US oversaw these last eighty years, sometimes by fiat, sometimes with guns, and sometimes, as with USAID and the like, with genuine good will. What can I say but points 3 and 4 above. Humanity is not a good role model for a functioning planet. Democracy is not necessarily safe in the hands of voters.

So what do we do? Having been looking for a home for so long, do I abandon my ideal house because my country has turned into our unideal home? Do we get out while the going is good? Or do we stay and make the most of it and fight that powers that be? (Because we do have to fight, and I don’t mean violently, but given the lack of Democratic unity in the wake of a genuine defeat last November, it is up to citizens to ensure this country does not become Spain of a hundred years ago, on a fast track to civil war and several decades of fascist dictatorship.) Or do we keep our proverbial whistles wet and our options open, all of us, wherever we live, doing what we can to benefit our “home country” while acknowledging the ludicrous nature of our passport in the first place, nonetheless keeping on hand an exit strategy, or even just a retirement plan that doesn’t keep us locked within our current borders? I know my answer.

Let’s end on positives, because there are so many. Last weekend I reunited with the composer of that song “Looking For A Home,” Hub Moore, and his former partner in Three Colors, the band without which I would probably not have made New York my home 37 years ago, Chris Harford. (After Three Colors, a band I managed, evidently unsuccessfully, broke up, both Hub and Chris independently landed major label solo deals; sax player Dan Colley went on to Morphine; latter-day pianist John Goetchius spent the last fifteen years in the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. I was not mad to have faith in them, just unable to convince others!)

Hub stopped actively looking for a home decades back, and settled in Brooklyn; we found ourselves living close by each other for several years, and spent much family time together during that time. Chris never really left the part of New Jersey he always called home, the fertile area from Princeton out to Pennsylvania’s New Hope, and has built a flourishing independent career around his activity as a solo artist and on the jam band scene, and now with his label Soul Selects, on the reggae scene too. Chris started a dub project during Covid – Blanc du Blanc – and for its fourth album, Before The Beginning, managed to convince Scientist to mix it. The Scientist, protégé of King Tubby and renowned solo producer/artist/remixer in his own right.

Chris then went one better and, the last weekend of April, brought Scientist over from his current California home to a barn in NJ’s Somerset County for an album release party that Scientist mixed live, all instruments - Chris on guitar, Hub on bass - going straight through the PA where the dubmaster sent them back out across a top-notch system that resulted in exactly what was intended – pure live dub.You can witness the proof below.

It was a beautiful afternoon and evening, just another reminder of the good that still happens in this country. And so, as I write this, was the punk show held just last night in a vast community bike shop – Old Spoke’s Home – in my older son’s chosen home town of Burlington, VT, where he came for college and never left. Campbell’s partner, Taegan – they recently moved in together and this is my first time seeing their place and meeting my new grandson, a 10-month-old ginger feline called Sticky – sings vocals in a band called We’re Here To Kill!, or WH!TK for when there isn’t space on the flier. They rocked. They rebelled. My younger son got corralled into mixing the sound for them. It was a blast, as you will also be able to tell from the video below.

Some of us, then, like my son Campbell (for now) find our home early in life. Some, like my mother, find it on their way through life and return to it for the last years of their life. Some, like my dearly departed friend Mike Peters, start traveling the world and find that there’s no place like home and, in later years, are able to help put that home on the destination map. Some never leave their home, either out of choice or circumstances. And some of us are always Looking For A Home… until, as the song says,

“When I arrive I’m going to unpack my bags

when I arrive I’m going to lay down my bones

I look into your eyes for a welcome mat -everywhere I go.”

Peace. (And protest.)

1. As some of you know, Crystal Palace did make the FA Cup Final. There was a whole thread to be written here about how one’s home team is the part of one’s home one always keeps with oneself, wherever one goes. For another day - perhaps after the final. With that flight already booked, I hope to be “home” for the match, and am on a quest for a ticket.