“Where are you from?”
It’s a question I hated most of my life. There’s a threshold in which you can answer this question appropriately.
“I was born in the next town over, but I’ve lived here most of my life.”
“Oh, I lived in XYZ til I was 9 and then moved here.”
“Came here for college and been loving it ever since.”
When you’ve moved more than once, more than twice, more than three times…things get complicated. It’s not so much the quantity of places as the individual meaning each location embodies in your life story. If I say I’m from Michigan, I’m missing a big Seattle-shaped hole in my life. If I say I’m from Virginia, I feel like a fraud. If I say I’m from Jamaica, whoever I’m talking to is convinced I’m a fraud. If I say I was born in Nebraska…well, on this side of the country, people look at me funny.
Now that I’m a little older, I realize that this unique history gives me a bit of a superpower. By picking and choosing my identity given each social setting, I have the power to relate to a huge range of people and experiences. By laying the whole situation out there, I get a party story that can be fairly entertaining. And if I really don’t want to continue the conversation at all I can just adopt a sorrowful look in my eyes, gaze off into the unseen past, and say with a sigh, “It’s a long story.”
Kidding on that last one. Mostly.
I’m learning to embody the question, “Where are you from?” because I don’t think it should be a simple answer, regardless of if you live in the same house you were born in or you’re a military brat. My memory is a map, and cutting any one place out renders it useless.
However, sometimes people phrase their question differently. Sometimes they want to know about a much more elusive designation. They want to know about your hometown.
“Hometown” is an idea I’ve struggled with since I was a kid. A hometown is something that everyone should have. It doesn’t seem like a tricky question. Hometown pride, homecoming, alumni weekends, childhood bedrooms, awkward middle school memories. Some people move back to their hometowns and it becomes their children’s hometown. Other people grow up to avoid their hometown like the Spotsy Walmart on a Saturday evening (was that a “hometown” joke?)
My query is: can you choose your own hometown?
My standard answer to all location-based personal history questions these days is something along the lines of, “I’m from a little bit of everywhere, but I call Muskegon, Michigan home.” It’s truthful on my end, succinct as can be, and allows the other person in the conversation to decide if they want to pry into that particular can of worms or not.
Here’s the thing, through. I never actually lived in Muskegon.
When I was 8 my family moved from Seattle, WA to Kalamazoo, MI. Through his own series of childhood moves, my father had lived in Kalamazoo in high school, eventually making his way a tad to the east to Michigan State for college. My grandma and grandpa on his side were from central Michigan, and also MSU alum. Kalamazoo was an awesome place to grow up.
But 40 minutes north of Kalamazoo was my secret place. Muskegon, a town of pretty much no one, was where my mother, her siblings, and her parents had all grown up. There was a hot dog place, an ice cream place, and a caramel corn stand that I loved. A BBQ place and perch restaurant that I loathed. A 25 cent trolley that could take you to the library that looked like a castle, and the old people’s home that I still get the heebie-jeebies walking past. But most of all, there was my grandparents, and there was the beach.
Muskegon could be boring for an awkward tween, but the beach, miles of stretchy white sand against omnipresent Lake Michigan, was a place for renewal. As an adult, I walk the lighthouse pier and count the waves that crash over the concrete break wall. As a kid, I skipped from boulder to boulder, chasing lemmings and braving water that somehow never felt cold at the time. No matter how I took it in, the water was a source of power to me.
While living in Kalamazoo we visited Muskegon what felt like every weekend to see my grandparents. I loved that apartment. I loved that I knew how to pick the lock on the front door of the building; I loved that I was convinced no one else noticed how amazing the tree in the backyard was but me. I loved that all the older folks in the building somehow remembered me from when I was a baby, even though they scared me a bit. I loved the warmth my grandparents filled the place with. My grandpa, silent and intimidating by the time I knew him, routinely snuck caramels into my pockets. My gramma, whip-smart and tough as all get-out, taught me and my friends to play poker with her collection of 50 cent pieces up for grabs. I could picture my whole life panning out in this little town.
It didn’t. My grandpa passed away. My grandmother moved to Florida to be near other family. My parents and I moved to Kingston, Jamaica, where the culture shock quickly shook loose the memories of my school, friends, and home in Kalamazoo.
But, somehow, Muskegon stayed. And while it remained the same, it also grew with me. We visited for extended stays in the summer, with various cousins and friends cycling in and out of my grandparents’ old apartment. I graduated from taking the trolley on my own to biking downtown on my own; years later, when I returned with my own car to drive, I realized I already knew my way around town - if I roughly followed the bike paths, at least. I remember sticky 4th of July evenings lighting sparklers; an overcast early fall day spent with an ill-conceived plan to float an air mattress on Lake Michigan; a biting cold January day when we buried my gramma. After graduating college, I brought my boyfriend here. A couple years later he became my husband and we came back again.
My mother truly grew up here. She knows the town like the back of her hand, every grocery store - turned gas station - turned flower shop - turned grocery store again, every refurbed apartment complex that used to be an abandoned factory that used to be a thriving workplace. My family stories are her memories experienced first hand. Her claim on Muskegon will never be contested.
If you don’t have that kind of stability in your past, what makes a hometown? Is it your memories, or the collective memories of your loved ones? Is it the town that stays forever the same in your mind, or the one you relearn to love with every change ushered in by a new decade? Is there a length of residency requirement? A ratio of good memories to bad? A place whose beauty you adore or a place whose flaws you find beautiful?
All I know for sure is that the place I’ve been living for the past eight years will never truly be my home, while a town I never spent more than three consecutive months in holds an in-extractable part of my identity. Can you do something as audacious as simply choose your hometown for yourself?
I’m saying yes.