Susan Flynn
This time of year, people talk about heading "home" for the holidays.
One friend calls "home" a place he hasn't lived for some 30 years. The second he steps off the plane in Minnesota, he says, a peace settles over him. It's a feeling deep in the soul that this is where he most belongs.
It has occurred to me that I have now lived in Beverly longer than anywhere else in the last 40 years. My parents moved when I was 4, and again when I was 16, so my longest stay in one place was 12 years.
Beverly has been my address for 15.
Yet, I am not from Beverly. I was not born at Beverly Hospital. I never wore black and orange together outside of Halloween. And I confess, I have never been to a Beverly-Salem Thanksgiving Day football game.
That's pitiful Panther pride, I know, though there are explanations.
For many years, I left Beverly to spend the holiday with my family. Then my children were small, or I was busy with hosting duties. It was cold.
The truth is The Game is just a game to me.
And with this admission comes a question: At what point does the place where you live become your home?
I have posed this query to dozens of people, and I am surprised by the variety of answers.
It's easy for the people who were born where they still live. There's no ambivalence about the word "home." For the rest of us, the definition gets more complicated.
One person I know has lived in Beverly for more than 60 years, yet home is "Salem," the place where he grew up. Others disagree. Home is not where you went to high school; home is the place where you raise your family. Home, some offer, is the place you think of lying in bed at night that makes you feel warm inside.
The interpretations kept coming.
"Home" is where your parents live, or where they are buried, or even the place where you want to be buried.
Paul Guanci works in Beverly and lives in Beverly and got elected as Beverly City Council president. People assume he's Beverly-born and -bred. Yet Reading is where he grew up.
After Guanci bought his first house in Beverly and had his children, the city became his home. It's a feeling, he agrees, a commitment you make. "It just seems right to me," he says.
Joan Sullivan, who was active in the Yes for Beverly override campaign last year, would often refer to "the lifelong residents and the people who have chosen to make Beverly their home" when making a point at meetings. I liked that.
She and her husband made the choice in 1993, when they bought a house here. Over time, Beverly, as they hoped, has become their home. They love the ocean and small-city feel and unique downtown with great restaurants. But it's more than that. They have neighbors who look out for them and their children. They are part of a community. There is something "Cheers"-like in it all.
"I love living in a place," she says, "where people know your name."
Beverly is not where she was raised, but Beverly is the place where she feels like she belongs.
So I wonder, is that true for me? Is Beverly my home or the place where I live?
All I know is that when I head to Lynch Park on a summer day, and sit on a bench way up on the point with the harbor on all three sides, I do get a feeling, one of comfort and familiarity. I can't imagine any place in the world that would make me feel quite the same way.
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Staff writer Susan Flynn can be reached at 978-338-2658 or sflynn@salemnews.com.
