Jessica
I’ve always considered myself a bit driftless. I’ve lived in three major cities and one small city in my life. My close family lives in California, Massachusetts, and Nebraska. While I have many close friends that live in Minneapolis with me, I have several who are spread across the U.S., literally from coast to coast. With all of this rootlessness in mind, I’ve always wondered what it would be like if my husband and I picked up and moved again. What if we just selected a city we liked, based upon whether it was close to friends or family or just had a landscape that resonated with us, and started over?
With all of that in mind, we saw Away We Go this morning. Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes, the movie follows a thirty-something couple who are searching for a city to raise their soon-to-be born child. Of course, that’s just a cover. What they’re really searching for is community, family, and their place in the world. They make pit stops across North America, from Phoenix to Miami, visiting friends and family while trying their lives on for size.
While the movie isn’t perfect, some of the comedic characters are truly just broad stereotypes, it deeply resonated with both me and my husband. Whenever we travel somewhere together, we talk about the same thing: What if we lived here? What if we moved? What would our lives look like in this place? What is the right place for us? We’ve even gone so far as to making lists of the qualities our perfect home would have, from access to the wild to excellent public transportation. The only certainty in all of these conversations is that we’d go there together, wherever the “there” happens to be. We always return home, thanks to mortgages, steady jobs, a great circle of friends, and a love affair with our neighborhood in Minneapolis. But we still talk about it, every time.
I think that the search that this movie touches on is a generational search for community. Our generation has, for better or worse, dispersed ourselves across the country, often far from family, friends, and familiarity. We follow jobs and scenes, make choices based on the best evidence at the time, but we’re all wondering if the places we find ourselves in are the right ones. Even as we shuffle from city to city and home to home, we’re looking ahead and behind.
I don’t know if we have models for finding the right kind of roots. Most of our parents picked cities after college and stuck with them, building their community from the ingredients they found there. (My mother though is quite the nomad and moves about every five years, so she’s the exception that proves the rule.) Most of our grandparents lived in the places they were born, close to their extended families, which has its own kind of comfort.
So, how do you do it, build a life and a family in a city that you love? Is it time and experience spent in one place? Is it traveling place to place, collecting bits and pieces of the right life, and pasting a life together like a collage? I strive for the kind of rootedness that the characters find at the end of the movie. (I won’t say where and spoil the fun, if you choose to see the movie). Although, I wonder if I’m just craning my neck too far and not seeing what’s in front of me.
