Where I’m from the word home is pronounced funny. The great Philadelphian-English dialect, as with many other words, turns it into a kind of open-jawed grunt. Anytime someone asks me what the accent is like, I return to this word, home, time and time again to give my best example. There are so many words that are pronounced differently in Philly that I could use instead like towel (tail), bagel (beggel), water (wooder), or creek (crick). And yet, I choose irony. I don’t have this accent anymore, it doesn’t even slip out sometimes. Did I lose it when I left? How long did it take? Did I even have it to begin with?
Every year of my life since I moved out of my parents house sixteen years ago, someone has asked me about home as if that place is still it. This is obviously worse around the holidays, like now, when unsuspecting coworkers and baristas don’t mean to push your family button, and you can’t really not answer in a polite way because you realize they are just being nice. Imagine being a person for whom family or place of origin carry no weight so that the words “Are you going home?” directed at near strangers just roll right off your tongue.
I’m definitely not someone who initiates, but sometimes the conversation strikes up and I dodge the question of family in a very deliberate way. Surely only someone with family would ask another person “Are you visiting family for the holidays?” But! If I was backed into an awkward conversational corner I would choose something much more impersonal and less presumptuous like “You doing anything this weekend?” When I do get the home for the holidays question, for anyone who needs some pointers, I do love to play dense. “Oh yea, my home is my apartment in Brooklyn so that’s where I’ll be!”
Anyway, it’s all especially weird this year because of COVID. People are still asking these questions when no one should be traveling to any family gatherings. Many people aren’t “going home for the holidays” to be with their family of origin for the first time ever, not because they finally set boundaries or cut someone off, but because a deadly virus is keeping them away. The pain of family separation is now relevant to almost everyone instead of just those who are estranged or incarcerated or separated by borders. In the words of the great Italian philosopher @Jaboukie, everyone is now appropriating queer culture.
The last time I “went home” for Christmas was maybe five years ago (honestly could have been ten, what is memory?). My older brother had flown in from Omaha to stay with my dad in our childhood home where he still lived. He had been there for two days by the time I saw him on Christmas and my dad had yet to appear. My dad spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s house and was too busy to spend time with his own kid who bought a plane ticket and even took time off from his cultish multi-level marketing job to be there.
On Christmas morning I drove over two hours from Brooklyn to a suburb of Philadelphia and picked my brother up, then we did the rounds with our grandmother another hour away. We were going to drive yet another hour in another direction to my dad’s family’s Christmas party for dinner. We were halfway there when my dad called my brother to say that he was leaving the party and for us to turn around and go home. He was going back to his girlfriend’s house and would be home in two (2!!!) days to drive my brother to the airport. That was the last time I attempted to see my father.
Fuming, I cursed him and drove us to a diner nearby as rejected children do on Christmas night to eat giant plates of french fries and drink black coffee. I could tell you alllll about my brother, but I’ll just say that he’s someone whose favorite coping mechanism is denial. For years I told him about the shitty antics my dad pulled with me and my younger brother. For years my brother defended him and told me I was overreacting. Now, after having experienced the deadbeat dad bullshit first-hand, he was... still defending him! In between bites of his fries, this absolute fool made up all kinds of excuses for our father. He has a new family now (a girlfriend with children she cares about) and we should be happy for him. He raised us and did the best he could (my favorite is when people tell you that you owe your parents because they gave you life and fed you). We reminded him of his old life, his terrible marriage with our mother (whom I look exactly like). If you’re not aware, people in the multi-level marketing scheming world have a specific language that basically strikes down any negative-speak. My brother calls it neg-bombing. I call it gaslighting. This was the last time I saw my brother.
There are very few times in my life now where I get to hear the Philly accent. When the world is normal, I usually drive to Philly a few times a year to eat the vegan versions of comfort food I grew up with— cheesesteaks, hoagies, tomato pie. My childhood best friend still has the accent even though he’s also been gone for years (Hi, Dennis). My younger brother’s voice, not tempered by a new city or fancy education, holds my most difficult ties to home. His speech hasn’t changed much since we were kids and so his voice is a time warp. Sometimes when he talks I’m transported to places I’d rather not visit. We are driving back from the Poconos when he lets a frog loose in the station wagon and wiggles all over trying to catch it. I am sitting on our front porch watching him learn to skateboard. I take him to the mall to pick out a present for his birthday. The thing about happy memories is that they’re devastating in hindsight, you had no idea what was to come.
Even though I know it’s not true, it feels hyperbolic to say that something isn’t safe even if there’s no real threat of physical danger. I know in my body that the lowest low, bare minimum requirement for safety is no threat of physical danger. I think a lot about how home is not a safe place for so many people, and it wasn’t always a safe place for me. I spent a great deal of my last five years at “home” with my parents by not actually being there. I was obsessed with school. I was at my friend's houses all the time. I ran away. As an adult on my own, there were so many years I spent fortunately housed, but without a real feeling of home. Bouncing around from shitty apartment to shitty apartment is a thing most young people do in New York City. It is a luxury to stay in the same place for more than a year. It is unfortunately also a luxury to find roommates who agree on the definition of filthy.
The house I grew up in was decorated green. It was a small house that was once the rectory of the church next door. My mom had this chaotic decorating idea that if you painted each wall a different color, it made the room look bigger. That meant that every wall in the living room (which essentially was the first floor) was painted shades of green from medium to dark. The couch was green, the recliner was green, the rug was green, the flowered wall paper border was green, the curtains were green, green art, and the front door was painted green too. She loved kitschy knick-knacks and yard sales, which she never left empty handed. She collected tiny chairs and would display anything from dolls to stuffed animals on them. She loved green glass vases. She loved doilies. She was a textbook maximalist. While I definitely inherited her love of old things and yard sales, I have renounced everything else.
When I moved in over seven years ago, I painted the walls of my poorly lit, eighteen inches underground apartment a gothic dark grey. Now a plant dad who cherishes sunshine (footcandles if we’re getting nerdy), I decided it was time for the dark to go in favor of something that wouldn’t eat up the light. Many hours of painting and extremely sore muscles later and I have a cute light pink living room (ok it’s really white but there is a serious pink tint and calling it pink makes me feel adventurous). Sometime during this process, my girlfriend Kala pointed out to me that everything in my apartment is black, white, or grey. First of all, I literally have colorful plants everywhere! Besides that, she was correct. The only acceptable place for color is my socks and underwear, and even that feels slightly uncomfortable. For some silly reason I never made a connection between my opposition to color and my mother’s love for it (duh, everything is about your mother). So obviously I’d decorate my home absolutely nothing like the one I couldn’t wait to escape.
For me, home is both a place and a feeling, but one that is quite the opposite of nostalgia. Home is softness and comfort, a space where I don’t shrink myself, where I can feel my shoulders relax, where I count on wet licks from adoring dogs to greet me without fail. Home is intimacy. It’s a place I can invite other freaks to be freaky. It’s the feeling I get when I rest my head on my girlfriend’s thighs (it’s taking a big juicy bite). Home is watching vampire movies in a pile of snoring dogs. Home is being in awe of the skyline every single time you turn that one bend on the BQE. Home is knowing that someone also feels home in you.
The collective idea of home, at least during this time of year, is tethered to the place and people who raised us. (Blood) family is always the most important, and (blood) family means home. We’re never meant to interrogate this or question whether or not we have healthy relationships to home. It doesn’t matter if these people actually know who we are. (I have a lot to say about the latest lesbian Christmas movie.) Luckily, being queer has given me a new definition of, well, almost everything. When I was young, I learned through watching others what happens when home is generative, flowers need water to grow. As an adult, I try every day to make up for lost time. I don’t own the apartment where I live so I will eventually have to leave, but I know it’s a place I’d never run away from. I make sure that things don’t just grow here, they flourish.
home + the philly accent