As my essays likely make plain, I've never been able to shake Montana's hold on me. It's interesting that there are some provincial similarities between the MT and NYC mindsets, as we've discussed. Montanans like to think of it as The Last Best Place. And while I agree with Bill Holm that the heart can be filled anywhere, it takes effort to break those formative ties. I have some fond memories of Iowa, which became a home for a time. And I'm doing my best not to simply live in exile in Pennsylvania until my kids are college age. But Montana will always be home. Something in the blood wakes up when I return.
As seems to be often the case, I am caught by a side point in your story. When I was 10 or 11 (I am now 81), a girl in my Brearley class (I have no memory of who it was, only the fact of the occasion) took me to see a friend of hers who lived in the Pierre! Could I have met your mother seventy years ago – or were there a number of people who lived in the Pierre? I can't remember what she looked like or what her name was, but I was impressed with where she lived.
Indeed, I am the opposite of you – having been brought up in Georgetown when it was a fairly quiet unassuming neighbourhood in Washington and then in Yorkville on the upper East Side of NYC, when it still had signs of its German background, I feel fairly rootless. It was very easy for me to move to London in 1968 where I feel very at home. I gained British citizenship for convenience and subsequently gave up my American citizenship (and wrote a funny piece about the process) but never really 'feel' British. Makes for a complex relationship with pronouns - do I say 'we British' (can't) or 'we Americans' (don't).
I would always draw forts and figure out to defend them. No castles for me. My grandmother, who was a sod hut teacher in Nebraska, would takes us to Saturday matinees. She loved Westerns. So I got to watch Randolph Scott, John Wayne and many others. She told me she met Buffalo Bill when she was a young girl. After the matinee sometimes we would go to Woolworth’s five and dime for a hamburger. On Saturdays they would be older men having coffee at the counter. They would always rub your head when you were close by. My brother and I learned to walk around another aisle to avoid them. I asked my grandmother who they were and she told us they were WW1 veterans and they came in to chat with their friends and some were just lonely. She always talked of the 3 Gs. Grit, gumption and guts. She lived part of her childhood at the county jail as her father was the sheriff of Lincoln county, Nebraska. Between her, my mother and my father they made the greatest impression on me in my life. So fortunate to have them.
David, I love your question! I grew up in Mt. Kisco, NY in a large rambling house. Nothing particularly special about the architecture, as I think about it now. But I can remember every nook and cranny and hallway and room of that house. Yes, there were backstairs for servants (although I ran up and down them). I was an only child til I was eight so I also remember the feeling of loneliness, especially in the afternoons after school when I played outside by myself. And I got married in that house when I was 21! Interestingly, I don’t “love” that house. It’s just there, indelible in my memory, a representation of my childhood.
I’m an Australian but I watch an American show ‘House Hunters’. It always amazes me how many Americans want a house just like they had as a child. They know all the styles of architecture and are oh so picky about things.
By comparison I was always taught that it’s a house’s occupants that matter. It’s a place of love and caring. I barely remember my childhood homes.
It is intriguing how a parent’s beliefs are passed so profoundly to their children. Hopefully we learn to stand back and consider their worth later in life. But I worry that many aren’t taught the necessary analytical skills to weigh up those beliefs. But that’s a whole different issue.
Always so much food for thought. Thank you. And all the best.
One of your best articles yet David. Really loved reading this one.
There is no doubt in my mind that where I grew up is indelibly imprinted on my soul and continues to influence me in every facet of my life. Every time I go home to see my parents I get goosebumps on my skin in anticipation of planting my feet back on the earth from whence I came. The fields of corn and wheat and beans filled with wildlife. The overpowering scent of life after a summer rain. Even now as I sit here writing this my heart is longing to go home and have some of my mother's fried chicken.
There was no money in my childhood but fortunately for me the hills and forests don't care where you came from or how much coin you have in your pocket. Where we come from greatly influences who we are.
All the best my friend and thanks again for a beautiful essay.
I grew up in a well-maintained but garishly appointed brick duplex in a decaying Pennsylvania town, equal parts Rust Belt and Appalachia. I was raised as an only child by lower-middle-class grandparents who dutifully met my material needs but were not stimulating companions, so like many Gen Xers, I was truly raised by television. I am struck by how many of my childhood memories involve the moody glow of one of the five (yes, five!) TV sets: the “big TV” in the living room, the basement TV where my grandparents lounged in a rec room, my bedroom TV playing MTV while I did homework, the spare bedroom TV where I exclusively watched baseball for some reason, and the small white cube TV in the kitchen, the one my grandfather referred to as “the utility set.” It was on during every meal.
When I was in middle school, I would sneak downstairs after my grandparents had gone to bed, turn on the sickly but benevolent fluorescent light above the kitchen sink, and watch the Weather Channel at a low volume on the utility set. Sometimes I would pour a glass of milk. It became a cherished ritual. Decades later, it occurred to me that I have often tried to recreate in my own adult apartments the snug mood of those evenings spent alone, briefly suspended in optimistic peace. I took in the rhythm of the national forecast and the smooth jazz that heralded local conditions. Sensing correctly from an early age that I would leave my hometown and likely never return, I contemplated our national geography and felt heartened by the maps, especially the multicolored temperature one that was covered in white numbers like Argus eyes. I imagined myself in quiet communion with all the other people watching, wondering at the souls in Phoenix, in Miami, in Tulsa. In International Falls or Minot. Even when you felt invisible, you too were on the map. And even when you were just at home, you could be everywhere.
It's easy to love my hometown and childhood because I was always thankful for it - thankful for what was provided, thankful for the small things, not thinking I was "better" than because my dad worked hard to provide for the 7 of us. Gratefulness, thankfulness, humility, being taught that "to whom much is given, much is required" with a quiet servant's heart, built character and provided valuable perspective growing up into adulthood. Also, I love NYC! Thanks for the insightful glimpse into your childhood. Reading as a super-power is spot on!
Wonderful sense memory here, David. I saw you as a small child in that mansion and on that walk with your mother. Yes, my childhood home was the brown shingled farmhouse outside of Princeton surrounded by wild fields and orchards, renovated by my architect mother, my father in the adjoining back house writing. It was a place of magic and secrets and sometimes violence when my father drank. I left angry but long, at times to return.
12 months ago, I moved from New Zealand to Warsaw, Poland (my wife's hometown). We were looking at apartments to rent and I would go around each room with the estate agent and try to figure out which windows the sun would be coming through at which times of the day and the agent said to me "oh you New Zealanders are obsessed with the light!"
Apparently, she once had another New Zealand couple who had done exactly the same thing. It wasn't until that moment I realised the influence of home. New Zealand is such a bright and open place it has always been instinctive for us to have light as a key criteria of where we live.
Finally we moved into a place, the European winter arrived and the sun disappeared for four months, so the entire exercise became redundant anyway.
I found this fascinating. I grew up and attended college in the NY metro, and I've often thought the experience of "The City" must be so different for someone with money. "My" New York is inextricably intertwined with the smell of urine in doorways, the filth and noise of subway platforms, drinking piss beer at East Village dive bars, $8 haircuts at Astor Place, and cheap eats like falafel at Mamoun's, slices at St. Mark's pizza, pea soup at Cozy Soup & Burger and pierogis at Theresa's. My college memories of NYC include gutsing it through Port Authority and past all the catcalling sleazebags outside the peepshows on 42nd Street to get to my summer and winter break job on 41st and Lex. My own working class Jewish origins lie in Newark, NJ by way of Ellis Island and before that, a shtetl in Kiev.
I LOL'd at the image of you as a shock-collared dog living in the 1-mile uptown rectangle and the description of your cavernous apartment with your bedroom located in the hinterlands beyond the Suez Canal. Too good! It brought to mind the Mazels. Interesting that the WASP snobs in your building gave your Jewish family a pass because the money and name change made it so easy to forget who they were--or maybe many of them didn't even know?
In high school, my favorite day was lunch at Serendipity III and browsing at Bloomingdales (never could afford to buy anything there), followed by ice cream sundaes at Rumpelmeyers in the Plaza Hotel and maybe a walk in Central Park if it was summer--my way of pretending to be that privileged child that you actually were.
Thanks for sharing your story David. This explains the unexplainable odor I’d always smell walking the halls in college 😂: “I never made my bed, slept on a bare mattress, rarely did laundry, ate twinkies and pizza, gained twenty pounds, and probably smelled quite bad.” But gaining 15-20 lbs is pretty standard I think? I know I did.
Sorry, David, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. That you were shaped by your circumstances, just as the annual rings of a tree will become less circular as the tree grows? Aren't we all shaped the same way, regardless of our circumstances? That growing up rich gave you advantages that you now feel guilty about? Depends on what you do with those advantages, doesn't it? Seems to me that the subtext here is about choices. It is far different if you take those advantages to use as a bludgeon against others as you claw your way to even greater advantages...need I give you the most obvious example...than if you use your advantages to try, in some small way, to make the world a better, fairer, and more generous place. Those choices are available to anyone, of course, but someone who grows up rich, educated, and aware of their position has a better chance of making an impact. I don't know how you lived before--if you feel you were among those who held the process back--but it seems to me that you chose to write these columns as to search, as a means to try to move the process forward. Rich or poor, that is all any of us can do.
Thank you David for this excellent essay. You offer great insight into growing up in a life of luxury and privilege which I find interesting because I've always wondered how that would be. As you said here though, your gorgeous home became simply your home. Wherever we live, even if it seems exotic, it becomes our home.
I grew up very removed from anything exotic! It was the northern Canadian prairies. The term redneck (which I use lovingly sometimes) comes to mind. It wasn't until I arrived at mid-life that I realized the imprint the land and place still held on my soul (for good or for bad). I am working to both honor it and grapple with it.
David, I enjoyed visualizing your memories so concretely, like your Suez Canal and the mysterious writing on the bedroom window. We moved a lot when I was growing up, so each place left a different impression. The place I was sorriest to leave was a house that would have been out of our means in any place except the small town where Dad worked for about a year. The house had a wide front porch, built-in bookcases and benches flanking the fireplace, a formal dining room with a massive mahogany hutch for fine dishes. I was just old enough to have the run of the town. I walked everywhere, collecting chestnuts and rocks. We didn't stay long, but the combination of a fine house and perfect freedom made an indelible year. I don't remember growing attached to the next place until I moved away and came back as an adult. Your essay also called up a lot of memories of living in NYC as one of those outsiders like the Philly fans. :-)
As my essays likely make plain, I've never been able to shake Montana's hold on me. It's interesting that there are some provincial similarities between the MT and NYC mindsets, as we've discussed. Montanans like to think of it as The Last Best Place. And while I agree with Bill Holm that the heart can be filled anywhere, it takes effort to break those formative ties. I have some fond memories of Iowa, which became a home for a time. And I'm doing my best not to simply live in exile in Pennsylvania until my kids are college age. But Montana will always be home. Something in the blood wakes up when I return.
As seems to be often the case, I am caught by a side point in your story. When I was 10 or 11 (I am now 81), a girl in my Brearley class (I have no memory of who it was, only the fact of the occasion) took me to see a friend of hers who lived in the Pierre! Could I have met your mother seventy years ago – or were there a number of people who lived in the Pierre? I can't remember what she looked like or what her name was, but I was impressed with where she lived.
Indeed, I am the opposite of you – having been brought up in Georgetown when it was a fairly quiet unassuming neighbourhood in Washington and then in Yorkville on the upper East Side of NYC, when it still had signs of its German background, I feel fairly rootless. It was very easy for me to move to London in 1968 where I feel very at home. I gained British citizenship for convenience and subsequently gave up my American citizenship (and wrote a funny piece about the process) but never really 'feel' British. Makes for a complex relationship with pronouns - do I say 'we British' (can't) or 'we Americans' (don't).
I would always draw forts and figure out to defend them. No castles for me. My grandmother, who was a sod hut teacher in Nebraska, would takes us to Saturday matinees. She loved Westerns. So I got to watch Randolph Scott, John Wayne and many others. She told me she met Buffalo Bill when she was a young girl. After the matinee sometimes we would go to Woolworth’s five and dime for a hamburger. On Saturdays they would be older men having coffee at the counter. They would always rub your head when you were close by. My brother and I learned to walk around another aisle to avoid them. I asked my grandmother who they were and she told us they were WW1 veterans and they came in to chat with their friends and some were just lonely. She always talked of the 3 Gs. Grit, gumption and guts. She lived part of her childhood at the county jail as her father was the sheriff of Lincoln county, Nebraska. Between her, my mother and my father they made the greatest impression on me in my life. So fortunate to have them.
David, I love your question! I grew up in Mt. Kisco, NY in a large rambling house. Nothing particularly special about the architecture, as I think about it now. But I can remember every nook and cranny and hallway and room of that house. Yes, there were backstairs for servants (although I ran up and down them). I was an only child til I was eight so I also remember the feeling of loneliness, especially in the afternoons after school when I played outside by myself. And I got married in that house when I was 21! Interestingly, I don’t “love” that house. It’s just there, indelible in my memory, a representation of my childhood.
I’m an Australian but I watch an American show ‘House Hunters’. It always amazes me how many Americans want a house just like they had as a child. They know all the styles of architecture and are oh so picky about things.
By comparison I was always taught that it’s a house’s occupants that matter. It’s a place of love and caring. I barely remember my childhood homes.
It is intriguing how a parent’s beliefs are passed so profoundly to their children. Hopefully we learn to stand back and consider their worth later in life. But I worry that many aren’t taught the necessary analytical skills to weigh up those beliefs. But that’s a whole different issue.
Always so much food for thought. Thank you. And all the best.
One of your best articles yet David. Really loved reading this one.
There is no doubt in my mind that where I grew up is indelibly imprinted on my soul and continues to influence me in every facet of my life. Every time I go home to see my parents I get goosebumps on my skin in anticipation of planting my feet back on the earth from whence I came. The fields of corn and wheat and beans filled with wildlife. The overpowering scent of life after a summer rain. Even now as I sit here writing this my heart is longing to go home and have some of my mother's fried chicken.
There was no money in my childhood but fortunately for me the hills and forests don't care where you came from or how much coin you have in your pocket. Where we come from greatly influences who we are.
All the best my friend and thanks again for a beautiful essay.
I grew up in a well-maintained but garishly appointed brick duplex in a decaying Pennsylvania town, equal parts Rust Belt and Appalachia. I was raised as an only child by lower-middle-class grandparents who dutifully met my material needs but were not stimulating companions, so like many Gen Xers, I was truly raised by television. I am struck by how many of my childhood memories involve the moody glow of one of the five (yes, five!) TV sets: the “big TV” in the living room, the basement TV where my grandparents lounged in a rec room, my bedroom TV playing MTV while I did homework, the spare bedroom TV where I exclusively watched baseball for some reason, and the small white cube TV in the kitchen, the one my grandfather referred to as “the utility set.” It was on during every meal.
When I was in middle school, I would sneak downstairs after my grandparents had gone to bed, turn on the sickly but benevolent fluorescent light above the kitchen sink, and watch the Weather Channel at a low volume on the utility set. Sometimes I would pour a glass of milk. It became a cherished ritual. Decades later, it occurred to me that I have often tried to recreate in my own adult apartments the snug mood of those evenings spent alone, briefly suspended in optimistic peace. I took in the rhythm of the national forecast and the smooth jazz that heralded local conditions. Sensing correctly from an early age that I would leave my hometown and likely never return, I contemplated our national geography and felt heartened by the maps, especially the multicolored temperature one that was covered in white numbers like Argus eyes. I imagined myself in quiet communion with all the other people watching, wondering at the souls in Phoenix, in Miami, in Tulsa. In International Falls or Minot. Even when you felt invisible, you too were on the map. And even when you were just at home, you could be everywhere.
It's easy to love my hometown and childhood because I was always thankful for it - thankful for what was provided, thankful for the small things, not thinking I was "better" than because my dad worked hard to provide for the 7 of us. Gratefulness, thankfulness, humility, being taught that "to whom much is given, much is required" with a quiet servant's heart, built character and provided valuable perspective growing up into adulthood. Also, I love NYC! Thanks for the insightful glimpse into your childhood. Reading as a super-power is spot on!
Wonderful sense memory here, David. I saw you as a small child in that mansion and on that walk with your mother. Yes, my childhood home was the brown shingled farmhouse outside of Princeton surrounded by wild fields and orchards, renovated by my architect mother, my father in the adjoining back house writing. It was a place of magic and secrets and sometimes violence when my father drank. I left angry but long, at times to return.
12 months ago, I moved from New Zealand to Warsaw, Poland (my wife's hometown). We were looking at apartments to rent and I would go around each room with the estate agent and try to figure out which windows the sun would be coming through at which times of the day and the agent said to me "oh you New Zealanders are obsessed with the light!"
Apparently, she once had another New Zealand couple who had done exactly the same thing. It wasn't until that moment I realised the influence of home. New Zealand is such a bright and open place it has always been instinctive for us to have light as a key criteria of where we live.
Finally we moved into a place, the European winter arrived and the sun disappeared for four months, so the entire exercise became redundant anyway.
This is so good. I would read a whole book of your story
I found this fascinating. I grew up and attended college in the NY metro, and I've often thought the experience of "The City" must be so different for someone with money. "My" New York is inextricably intertwined with the smell of urine in doorways, the filth and noise of subway platforms, drinking piss beer at East Village dive bars, $8 haircuts at Astor Place, and cheap eats like falafel at Mamoun's, slices at St. Mark's pizza, pea soup at Cozy Soup & Burger and pierogis at Theresa's. My college memories of NYC include gutsing it through Port Authority and past all the catcalling sleazebags outside the peepshows on 42nd Street to get to my summer and winter break job on 41st and Lex. My own working class Jewish origins lie in Newark, NJ by way of Ellis Island and before that, a shtetl in Kiev.
I LOL'd at the image of you as a shock-collared dog living in the 1-mile uptown rectangle and the description of your cavernous apartment with your bedroom located in the hinterlands beyond the Suez Canal. Too good! It brought to mind the Mazels. Interesting that the WASP snobs in your building gave your Jewish family a pass because the money and name change made it so easy to forget who they were--or maybe many of them didn't even know?
In high school, my favorite day was lunch at Serendipity III and browsing at Bloomingdales (never could afford to buy anything there), followed by ice cream sundaes at Rumpelmeyers in the Plaza Hotel and maybe a walk in Central Park if it was summer--my way of pretending to be that privileged child that you actually were.
Thanks for sharing your story David. This explains the unexplainable odor I’d always smell walking the halls in college 😂: “I never made my bed, slept on a bare mattress, rarely did laundry, ate twinkies and pizza, gained twenty pounds, and probably smelled quite bad.” But gaining 15-20 lbs is pretty standard I think? I know I did.
Sorry, David, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. That you were shaped by your circumstances, just as the annual rings of a tree will become less circular as the tree grows? Aren't we all shaped the same way, regardless of our circumstances? That growing up rich gave you advantages that you now feel guilty about? Depends on what you do with those advantages, doesn't it? Seems to me that the subtext here is about choices. It is far different if you take those advantages to use as a bludgeon against others as you claw your way to even greater advantages...need I give you the most obvious example...than if you use your advantages to try, in some small way, to make the world a better, fairer, and more generous place. Those choices are available to anyone, of course, but someone who grows up rich, educated, and aware of their position has a better chance of making an impact. I don't know how you lived before--if you feel you were among those who held the process back--but it seems to me that you chose to write these columns as to search, as a means to try to move the process forward. Rich or poor, that is all any of us can do.
Thank you David for this excellent essay. You offer great insight into growing up in a life of luxury and privilege which I find interesting because I've always wondered how that would be. As you said here though, your gorgeous home became simply your home. Wherever we live, even if it seems exotic, it becomes our home.
I grew up very removed from anything exotic! It was the northern Canadian prairies. The term redneck (which I use lovingly sometimes) comes to mind. It wasn't until I arrived at mid-life that I realized the imprint the land and place still held on my soul (for good or for bad). I am working to both honor it and grapple with it.
David, I enjoyed visualizing your memories so concretely, like your Suez Canal and the mysterious writing on the bedroom window. We moved a lot when I was growing up, so each place left a different impression. The place I was sorriest to leave was a house that would have been out of our means in any place except the small town where Dad worked for about a year. The house had a wide front porch, built-in bookcases and benches flanking the fireplace, a formal dining room with a massive mahogany hutch for fine dishes. I was just old enough to have the run of the town. I walked everywhere, collecting chestnuts and rocks. We didn't stay long, but the combination of a fine house and perfect freedom made an indelible year. I don't remember growing attached to the next place until I moved away and came back as an adult. Your essay also called up a lot of memories of living in NYC as one of those outsiders like the Philly fans. :-)