Manifest Destinations. Not.

Your destination is on your left. She never loses her self-assured monotone. Even when she is wrong. I ignore her and keep driving.

Your destination is on your left. She is insistent. It is pointless to argue with her, counterproductive to smash her into the dashboard. She persists. Make a u-turn, she says, still in that annoying self-righteous monotone. Ha! Obviously she missed the "no u-turn" sign on the side of the road. She somehow knows there's a Mobil station on the corner, but she's clueless when it comes to the rules of the road.

I turn around -- legally -- and head back in the other direction. I expect her to call me a wimp for not making a u-turn, but she's too busy feeling smug. Your destination is on your right, she says, not betraying one bit of the I told you so running through her circuits. I shout obscenities at her and keep driving, but she is unfazed. Your destination is on your right. 

Eventually, I turn around again and park across the street from my destination, which is now, as she cannot resist pointing out, on my left again. It is a house, definitely not the sprawling high school I was looking for. The street name is the same, as is the address, but it is not what I am looking for.

Frankly, the house looks as confused as I feel. Its dingy white facade and unkempt front lawn are at odds with the brightly painted white picket fence that encircles it. The fence tells one story, the house another. This is only temporary, the house tells me; this is only a pit stop, not a final destination. We have not even bothered to unpack. The fresh paint on the fence, though, that tells me the folks inside intend to stay awhile. Our destination is right here, it tells me. We care; we are digging in. I consider the possibility that both narratives can be true.

It occurred to me the other day that, come September, all three of my children will be living somewhere else. Somewhere away from Chicago, the city they have always known as home. The city where I have lived for more than half my life but where I still consider myself to be a visitor. My address has changed several times here; I've packed and unpacked many boxes, but I have never fully unpacked my soul.
It's not that I have ever felt unwelcome here, certainly not that I don't have cherished friends. I have amassed more than half a lifetime's worth of memories, some good, some not. Come to think of it, I don't even dislike it here. Far from it. Still, when people I meet ask me where I'm from, my first instinct is always to say Brooklyn. I am from Brooklyn, but I live in Chicago now, I tell them. As if it were nothing more than a stopover.

I wonder if my children feel as I do, no matter where they are, that a piece of their soul resides in the place where they began their journey. That if a destination appears to be on the right, all you need to do is wait and it's somewhere else. Ironically, my oldest will be living in New York soon, a stone's throw from where I grew up, but I know she will not -- now or ever --  consider herself a New Yorker. No matter how adept she has or will become at navigating the subway system or weaving through crowded sidewalks or spending lots of money to live in cramped spaces, she will always be a Chicagoan. An avid Cubs fan, accustomed to running along the shore of a crystal blue lake as opposed to the gritty banks of a murky river, expecting prime time television to begin at seven, not eight. The same, I think, is true of my other two children. As comfortable and settled as they might feel wherever they are at the moment, like it or not Chicago is in their blood.

And one day, if I somehow end up back where I started, in Brooklyn (as many have predicted), I will never be able to fully unpack the piece of my soul that is now occupied by Chicago. Brooklyn will be a far different place. Not geographically, of course, but because I will be a far different person, much farther along in my journey. We are all, I think, a bit like that dingy house encircled by the freshly painted white picket fence. We pretend to have arrived, and we settle in, at least for the moment. We build our fences and feel secure, relieved to not be on the move. We never unpack everything though, knowing, deep down, that destinations may come and go -- or even remain the same -- but there isn't a GPS in the world that can tell us, with any degree of certainty, when and where our destiny is.

Your destination is on the right. Your destination is on the left. I consider doing a few 360's just to piss her off; maybe, eventually, she will realize she just doesn't know where I am headed. How could she, when I don't even have a clue.