There is an idiom that you may have come across which describes something as "like coming home." The thing being described changes: sometimes it is a familiar restaurant, a song, or an old friend, and until I moved away from home I never really got the significance of the phrase. As a teenager, coming home is just "going home," returning to that place where your parents are, where you do your homework, where you sleep. That isn't to say that there isn't anything good about home - dinner is good, video games are great, and yeah, I guess a family is nice - but the essence of home is routine, and there isn't any reverent in the routine.
After you find a new place to live, to eat, to sleep, to do the everyday items of habitation, those things lose their association with the place you grew up. When you return to that home in the years that follow - its paint, fixtures, and furniture unchanged - the essence of home that remains is emotional. For me, "coming home" meant innocence, welcome, warmth, acceptance. As you build yourself a new home and that childhood home is changed or sold, that feeling of coming home can become increasingly rare.
I was surprised to find it again recently in a book, Stephen King's The Wind Through the Keyhole.
Keyhole is a novel that takes place within King's Dark Tower series. Seven books and thousands of pages have come before Keyhole, but its story takes place in the spaces between books four and five. It had been years since I last read the seventh book, the series' chronological end, and while I have always championed the books and remembered them fondly, I didn't realize how much I missed their characters. Returning to the gunslinger Roland Deschain and his band of former New Yorkers (Eddie, Susannah, and Jake, each pulled from different decades and different versions of America) was like coming home. I could hear their voices in my head. I read a bit of familiar caustic wit and thought that's so Eddie!
The first thirty-eight pages flew by. I was back on a long road with these characters, a looming goal ahead and an encroaching evil behind. When the protagonists took a moment to allow that trailing evil to pass them, the opportunity for a story could not be missed. I realized that Keyhole would be a frame story; the trials of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake would bookened another tail. Thankfully, the story told - of a young Roland Deschain - was a welcome one, as I had last read of young Roland's adventures in book four, Wizard and Glass.
I would eventually be taken from this story as well, as a second story-within-a-story emerged, this one somewhat cliche, but ultimately populated by great characters, a fantastic journey, and terrible challenges, all things that define the Dark Tower series as a whole. This second story was good after the all-too-familiar sinister step-parent part was out of the way, but it was by no means the highlight of the book, despite taking up more than half of Keyhole's 386 pages.
I finished The Window Through the Keyhole in about two weeks, and although the novel ranks low in my estimation of the entire Dark Tower series, the consumption of the book felt like devouring a good meal. And that really is the best term for it: devouring. I chewed through this book like I was starving for a good novel, and in a way I was. In early February I wrote about being defeated by Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. As I struggled through that book I began to doubt if reading was something that I enjoyed. It would be a terrible blow for me, and English teacher, to learn that I didn't enjoy reading anymore.
Thankfully, I was rapt by Keyhole. I was limited in time by the responsibilities of adult life and I wanted more time as I read. As a result, I cannibalized the in-between moments of other tasks. When I stopped at a red light I would open the book, read through a paragraph, then close the book when the light turned green. Yes, I was absolutely the guy at the front of the line of traffic that didn't go when the light changed.
I read during passing period. I read instead of grading. I read during commercials. I read during loading screens while playing video games. I would be lying if I said I didn't at least think about reading when using the restroom. (I'll let you make up your own mind on whether or not I did). I read and read and read and, in short order, the book was over.
When I opened the book and found reconnected with these characters, I felt a familiar comfort that I had missed. It was like coming home. But that need to read, to hear the creak of the spine as I opened the book, and to finally remove the bookmark and shelve the novel after I had finished it? That was not just coming home.
That was like remembering that I even had a home.