Honestly, I always knew it would eventually come to this. My wife’s Filipino family has lived in our Southern California house steadily now since 2018. We have spent only summers there and not all of them at that. So, it’s natural that I would begin feeling like a visitor in my own house.
It hit me hard two months ago upon arriving for our annual visit. Things had changed. The outdoor jacuzzi no longer held water, and the backyard had been rearranged. Unfamiliar objects lay everywhere, and my three-year-old nephew treated me like a stranger.
I’m not complaining, mind you. My immediate family has found a new home in the Philippines. Our kids attend school there, and we love the house we built overlooking Surigao Strait.
Still, it seemed strange being in a place so familiar yet so distant. And it made me contemplate the nature of the thing we call home, an exploration felt most acutely while visiting a friend I’ve known since high school.
“Have you been here before?” Ken inquired about the seaside restaurant we’d chosen for dinner in Long Beach, California, our mutual hometown.
In fact, I’d been there often. A lovely eatery next to an iconic pier called the Belmont, it was once among my favorite places to bring visitors, associates, and friends. And so we reminisced about our lives on that side of the Pacific as my 14-year-old son—mostly Filipino—looked on.
“Remember when we sailed to Catalina in my little boat?” Ken wondered.
Are you kidding? How could I forget?
He regaled us with the story. Catalina is a well-known island 26 miles off the Long Beach coast. So, being brash young know-it-alls, we had once sailed there in Ken’s 16-foot sloop.
Except that I forgot my sleeping bag in the car. And, struggling with early onset clumsiness, dropped my sunhat in the ocean before smashing my glasses on the deck. Then, trying to relax with a swim, ripped a hole in our rubber dinghy, making it impossible to get ashore.
All of which only foreshadowed the main event: getting jolted awake in the night by gigantic waves crashing over our bow. Call it Laurel and Hardy visit Catalina. The dramatic conclusion: barely surviving as my seasick co-conspirator vomited over the side while I blindly steered us home. Only to discover pus oozing from my unprotected blistered face singed with a painful second-degree sunburn.
Wow, what a trip, I could see my son thinking. Don’t get any ideas, I thought right back.
Earlier I’d taken him on a brief detour past what remained of the house I lived in through kindergarten. And made a mental note to one day show him the various other houses, schools, and hangouts I’d once inhabited in this distant town.
For now, though, the most pressing task was getting to the airport in time to catch our flight home. Let me repeat that: “home,” a term I use advisedly. What exactly does it mean? Is it the place you initially show up to get your first impressions of this magnificent, unruly world? Or the location now affording you the singular comforts you’ve always craved?
Perhaps it’s a bit of both.
All I know is that when I finally arrived at the big familiar house overlooking the Philippine Sea, I felt an overwhelming sense of joy. Call it a replay of that magic moment when the feeling we all call home first enters our weary souls. Clearly, it can happen more than once in a long lifetime filled with change. And yet, each time it feels as if it’s never happened before.
I love being back home in Southeast Asia, where everything is about what’s now or soon will be. And yet I also crave returning to my home across the sea, where everything is about what once was.
Mostly, I look forward to sharing the joy and mystery of it all with my young, bright-eyed son.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manla Times.
