Going Mobile

I came home for a few days at the end of the summer to find my bedspread fuzzy with shed dog’s hair. When I stormed out of my room and demanded to know since when, exactly, Sparky had been allowed on the furniture, my father said the dog had taken to sleeping on my bed—“It’s not like you live here anymore.”

He was right, of course: I don’t live there anymore. Over the course of my Harvard career, my—and, I suspect, many people’s—trips home have become progressively shorter and less frequent. With every trip, the clothes I’ve abandoned in my closet look shabbier and lonelier, and the books on my shelves more outgrown; with every trip, I am struck by the businesses that have closed in my hometown and by the new houses that loom, raw, over freshly-seeded lawns. I can no longer name the children who bicycle in wobbly circles in the street. I can no longer identify the dogs that strain, barking, against their leads when I walk my dog past. Like most of the kids from my hometown, I swore that once I got out, I’d never go back. I guess I hadn’t known it would happen so quickly.

Southern European and Latin American friends say things are different where they come from. Where they come from, they say, young adults often live with their parents until they’ve married. Where they come from, families coexist in a cheerful multigenerational chaos that Americans know only from pasta commercials. But American families are, and long have been, less rooted. Most of us will not extend our nuclear families so much as Xerox them with varying degrees of precision.

Once—say, at mid-century—college was the place you made that Xerox. You came to college from your hometown, met someone, married, and then replicated the home you’d come from—perhaps a little blurrily. John Updike ’54 married in his senior year here. In 1960, the median age of women at marriage was about 20; for men, it was about 23.

Now, though, we marry later—according to the Census Bureau, at last count, the median age at marriage was 25 for women and almost 27 for men. We do not replicate our families so quickly, but neither do we return, most of us, to the homes we’ve left.

Instead, we are a generation of gypsies. What we want to do for a few years, or even for a decade, after graduating from college does not necessarily bear any resemblance to what we want to do for the rest of our lives. In some essential ways, we will be homeless for much of our young adulthood. We may go years without knowing the names of children who bicycle past us, without owning good pots and pans or a matched set of dishes, without being able to paint the walls of the rooms where we live.

And because for perhaps ten years we will be single, mobile, adrift, Harvard is for many of us a of port of call where we prepare for our departure. Every year, we acquire more trappings of a home and fill our rooms with them; every year, there are more boxes to carry from storage. Every year, we become closer to the people we live with, reproducing in small ways the rituals of the families we’ve left. We eat together. We play board games. We congratulate each other extravagantly on minor successes. We have our own jokes and nicknames. When we squabble, it is according to established patterns. Lately, I have caught myself referring to our room as home—“Are you going home now?” where in years past I was careful to say, “the room,” separating the place we lived from anonymity only with the definite article.

Last weekend, replicating a Sunday-morning ritual of my secular youth, I bought a copy of The New York Times. I brought it back to my common room, and eventually my roommates drifted in and rifled through the paper to find the good sections. When we were draped over futon and chair and carpet, reading each other passages from the paper—“Hey, can you believe what Condoleeza Rice said?”—it reminded me of those childhood Sunday mornings, except with less competition for the sports section. When I glanced up from the style section, we looked sort of like a family. When I glanced up, it felt sort of like home.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator living in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.