Those of you of a certain age may rememeber the Minneapolitan alt-rockers Soul Asylum. They hit it big in 1993 with their album “Grave Dancers Union” and the brilliantly marketed single “Runaway Train” – one way to get your song played to death on MTV is to turn the video into a PSA. They were not a great band, but they weren’t offensive either and lead singer Dave Pirner had the looks that made all the little grungettes (and shoplifters) swoon.

There’s a song on “Grave Dancers Union” that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for roughly the last four years. It’s a handful of lines from the chorus of this slightly cheesy track that keep bouncing their way around my old auditory association cortex…

And oh, I am so homesick
But it ain’t that bad
Cause I’m homesick for the home I’ve never had.

It isn’t just since the beginning of this expat adventure that this song has taken its place in the soundtrack of my life. The first time I heard Pirner’s woeful voice, Seattle 1993, it hit home. Home – that’s the key. I didn’t (and don’t) really know what the word means. At the time, I was 3,000 miles away from the closest approximation of ‘home’ for me – my parents’ house. By that point in my life however, that didn’t correspond to ‘home’. Seattle wasn’t home, as much as I had hoped it would be, I was restless there and morbidly confused.

I’ve spent some part of the last fifteen years trying to figure out where ‘home’ was, what it meant. With my expatriation four and a half years ago, the concept became even more confusing. Quite literally I had ‘withdrawn’ myself ‘from my homeland’.  Over the years, my definition of the word has made the transition from wherever sleep found me on a given night through wherever my paycheck got sent up to wherever my budding family is at any given time.

And that’s where it stands today. Home is where Dr. O’C, Boy Z and I are at any given time. On a good day, that works for me. But I’m less than a year in Australia and on a lot of days I just don’t feel at home. In the course of a day, a simple thing – a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car, a nasal Aussie twang, bone dry hills – can serve as a vivid reminder of the utter foreignness of my ‘home’.

This post is going all over the place, but so is my mind right now. All this thinking and writing about home has me thinking about my national identity – something that is starting to fade the longer I’m away from my homeland. I catch myself getting sucked into the stereotypes about Americans that I encounter on a daily bases, despite knowing better. In one of the Q&A’s that my Interview 2009 has generated there was talk about keeping up kids’ national identities in international relationships. That was something that’s always been very important to me – I made sure to get Boy Z his U.S. citizenship, I stock his toy box with tokens of America. Hell, I dress him in American flag inspired shirts that would embarrass me if we were living in the States.

But what I’m beginning to wonder is whether or not it is important for Boy Z to be aware of his national identity as he’s growing up. I was keenly aware of and reveled in mine. I was of Italian descent. I was born of Canadian parents. I was a New York yankee in King Cotton’s court (or King Tobacco’s more accurately). But all this awareness of where I came from only served to make me feel ‘different’ from my Anglo-Saxon, American, southern fellows. I took that sense of being different and ran with it in some pretty stupid directions. I got great ‘pleasure’ out of feeling different (read superior) to those around me, but it didn’t ever get me much other than a sense of futile alienation. In fact it is only when I started to look for similarities with those around me that I started to feel happy with life.

Chances are that Boy Z is going to grow up an Aussie bloke. I don’t see another trans-continental move in the cards for us any time soon. Does it really matter that he was born in England, that his Dad is an American, that his Mum is Irish? Or would he be better served to settle in amongst his Antipodean brethren and just fit in? Would he be better off accepting that he’s like his peers – going through the same things at the same time. I don’t know the answer to these questions, but a lot of times I think that life could have been easier if I had run with the pack more rather than sitting in the corner feeling like…

We are not of this world
And there’s a place for us
Stuck inside this fleeting moment
Tucked away where no one owns it
Wrapped up in a haste,
And by mistake got thown away
And oh, I am so homesick

Maybe it’s time to stop listening to Soul Asylum…

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I shouldn’t be hard on Soul Asylum. I’ve been listening to ‘Grave Dancers Union’ while I write this one and even sixteen years on it sounds damn good (if a bit earnest). Check it out on Soul Asylum - Grave Dancers Union.

 
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