That Friday Freeling

This week's book: The Hundred-Foot Journey by  Richard C. Morais

If this week's book title sounds familiar but you have never read the book, then it may be because it was also made into a movie starring Helen Mirren and Om Puri. The movie takes a different turn from the book's path so if you have only seen the movie I recommend reading the book as well.

The book excerpt I chose does not come directly from the story itself but instead directly from the author of the story. While he was the guest at a Q&A session inside of Simon & Schuster’s offices in New York he was asked a question regarding the topic of home.

The question grabbed my attention like the first sighting of a Mister Softee truck on a Spring day in Manhattan. A mix of childlike curiosity, joy, and familiarity seeped into my skin every time I spotted that truck, especially on a Sunday afternoon stroll. Upon reading the question I froze. I was tempted to know the answer much like I was tempted by a vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles. This one was going to be good.

Excerpt:

Context: Richard C. Morais was asked the following by a group of his fans:

One of those serious questions that arises in your book is, Where is home? Like Hassan who spends most of his life living away from his homeland, you have lived all over the world, spending more time abroad than in the United States. What do nationality and homeland mean to you?

The author answers the following:

Ah. Nationality and homeland. That’s one of the great questions of the twenty-first century because so many of us are of mixed race and mobile. My Mother's family is from New York; my Father is a Canadian citizen, but he is of Portuguese descent. I'm an American but you already know about my various moves across the globe.
The Portuguese have a terrific word– saudade. Saudade expresses a kind of intense yearning to get back home, a nostalgia to recover something that has been lost. I think a lot of us have that. But as I get older, I've come to the point where I think that home is anywhere you are at that moment and at peace with the world. For me, that is no longer so attached to a physical place, it is really a state of being. Being in my garden in Philadelphia and sitting at a long table with friends and family and having a good meal, that's as close to home as I'll ever get.

~ Richard C. Morais, The Hundred-Foot Journey, 2008

Thoughts

I love how languages have one word to describe an entire novel of feelings. Hygge in Denmark, niksen in The Netherlands, schadenfreude in German, wabi-sabi in Japanese, and saudade in Portuguese.

"Saudade expresses a kind of intense yearning to get back home, a nostalgia to recover something that has been lost."

Nostalgia, they say, is a hell of a drug. The difference is this one is free for everyone, legal, and accessible in the blink of an eye. You are your very own nostalgia dealer. American social and political activist Abbie Hoffman once said "Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.” Huh, so we have a drugged-up trek to recover something that is lost, and after some time not only do we feel depressed about not finding it but it brings down our community as well. Damn.

I am so stuck on the word "nostalgia" because I find myself feeling it more often than I want to, or perhaps more often than I "should,"- a mix of both. Perhaps I got it from my Mom, a woman who moved far away from her large family (she has 7 brothers and 7 sisters) in Minnesota to start a new home with my Dad in Maine. She spent years longing to go back, wanting her new life to collide with her old life, to choose what she wanted to have changed, to have the good ol' days. As I grew older I found myself telling my Mom, "The good ol' days weren't always so great Mom, think plumbing, tuberculosis, and women’s rights!" Yet on the other hand I was also the one to pay a historian to take me around to all of the Hemingway haunts of Madrid (much of which I had already found on my own), only this time I got to intellectually converse with someone who was my same soul age.

I ask myself, How can I be nostalgic for a time before I was born? Why did I think I would have been a hit in 1920's Paris but today's Paris just didn't understand me? And why did I travel around the world looking for a home in someone when it would be a better idea to look for a home inside myself? I used to have a Friends mug and every time I grabbed it from my cupboard it brought sweet memories of the coffee house and Rachel Green’s hairstyles of the 90s. I re-watch reruns of Sex and the City longing for the days of hailing cabs and girlfriend brunches. My Mom and I share the same hands, the same feet, and the same thought whenever someone comments on our nostalgia, "What a compliment, sigh."

Morais says, "... it is really a state of being. Being in my garden in Philadelphia and sitting at a long table with friends and family and having a good meal, that's as close to home as I'll ever get."

Ooohh, this is so good.

Maine will always be my motherland, and NYC will always have my heart, but can't home be, say that hygge feeling? That Danish word which means "creating a warm atmosphere and enjoying the good things in life with good people." That feels like home to me. I can get down with plunging into a state of being.

In 2018, when I was living in Dubai, I flew to Tanzania to meet up and vacation with some of my NYC friends. On our last night there we went to a rooftop restaurant in Dar es Salaam enclosed with floor-to-ceiling windows, which was literally revolving. As the evening drifted on slowly but surely the scenery behind my friend Dave who was sitting directly across from me at the other end of the table alternated between shiny skyscrapers, geometrical office buildings, winding paved roads dotted with cars, and polychromic patches of green grass next to bodies of ocean blue, over and over and over again. I was convinced after some time, we were inside a kaleidoscope.

It is one of my best memories. We still laugh at this scenario in which we were all slowly turning in circles, the wine flowing to our heads, our mouths couldn't catch a break from the chewing and the chatting; a bunch of New Yorkers being straightforward with each other, delving into a discussion with gusto, speaking our minds, being free, while the people next to us were getting engaged. There I was, thousands of miles away from my Motherland, away from my heart, and I was in a state of being right at home.

~Zavoir