Maureen began the speckled dish sojourn with some thoughts about home. I like to think that she passed the dish onto me because we’ve both had experiences of living abroad—she as an expatriate American living in France, and I as an expatriate Briton living in the United States.

I’ve taken the process one step further however, by becoming an American citizen. This means that I am technically a dual citizen—I can call two places home. Or perhaps I have merely formalized the process of becoming an alien in two places at once, since the US government assures me that I am really an American wherever I go in the world, even if I return to my country of birth. Luckily for me, Her Majesty assures me that this is OK with her. As long as our countries remain good friends—and I think it’s safe to say we’re way past that unfortunate business back in the eighteenth century—I am not likely to be applying to Buckingham Palace for permission to relinquish my British citizenship any time soon.

But the experience of being an alien, I suggest, has more to do with the newness of coming to another country, rather than living in it and becoming to some extent, assimilated. Being an alien is about living each day as an infant negotiator of language, and being acutely conscious that the experience of homelessness has the most poignancy when it is newly experienced. When I first arrived in the United States, I was daily reminded that “they don’t do things like that here.” I spent hours laboring mightily to explain, or more often, to translate, the misunderstandings that arose when people find themselves divided from their neighbors by a common language, yet, curiously enough, not by the different spelling.

As the newness ebbs, assimilation begins. One of my first lessons in assimilation I learned in graduate school. My writing professor, a “philosopher-critic” who stormed the barricades of the American Establishment in the fifties and sixties with the likes of Norman Mailer, gave me a choice: spell American, or spell American. And he had no problem declaring Chekhov a greater playwright than Shakespeare, either. Conveniently reassured with the East Coast Ivy League equivalent of “But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead,” I learned to spell American just as well as I ever spelled the Queen’s English. And when I write now, I stumble along in Richard Gilman’s well-polished critical footsteps, so different from the tortuous half strangled Marxist quasi-proletariat lurchings of my undergraduate professors in their dark Satanic steel town of the English Midlands. Some things you should leave behind when you leave home.

The definition of home is, of course, not really about passports and where they come from, or feelings of alienation from your mother tongue, and how these things enable, or constrain, your choice of destination. I may feel slightly schizophrenic these days when I contemplate where home is—where I belong—but I quickly return to a sense of cognitive equilibrium when I remember that home is more a collection of people—my family and friends—than a place, or a country, or even dropping my ‘h’s in speech, and my ‘u’s in spelling.

I chose the title of this post to remind me that the expatriate syndrome is nothing new. The poet Browning also suffered, as I do, from the occasional pang of memory of an English spring while living abroad. By taking dual citizenship, I have added to his experience a yearning for a New England winter or fall whenever I’m sweating through another humid un-airconditioned British summer. Where is home? Sometimes it is a negation—wherever I am not.

So I’d like to propose a possible solution to the expatriate disease. It’s not new either—the Bedouin have been practicing this for thousands of years—and the gist of the idea is that if you want to stay home, always travel with your tribe. This is proving somewhat complex to realize in practice—I refuse to fly, and my husband won’t go to Europe any other way—and I’m meeting quite a few people these days that I would like to make part of my “tribe,” so this idea is still very much in the “you’re dreaming” category. But still.

Your thoughts on home or abroad?