Why do you live where you do? How rooted are you to that place?

Today’s Question of the Day comes, again, from wOw reader Elizabeth Bennett. Thanks Elizabeth! Do you have suggestions for future questions for us? If so, we’d love to hear them! Please send them to us by clicking here.

I have lived in the same high rise at Third Avenue and 38th Street since 1976. I saw them building it, realized it had 24-hour doormen which I needed, and I moved in the day they finished construction. Inertia and hundreds of files and books and an office have taken over my life. I no longer “live” here; I work here night and day and lie down for a few hours in the bedroom to watch TV, read and sleep. My friends are appalled; they say I am still living like a college freshman.

But I love my neighborhood (which is said to be the safest of all Manhattan’s police precincts), I love the staff in my building (at first, everyone was Cuban; now they are Russian and Spanish), I love El Rio Grande restaurant downstairs which keeps things humming night and day, I love the bus right up to the upper east side on Third Avenue and the fact that, in a pinch, I can walk to the theater district. I am only blocks from Grand Central and the New York Public Library. Also, outside my bedroom window I have the most beautiful view in New York of the Empire State Building lighted up every night. What more does one want?

I live in the city of New York because this is where I was born and it’s home. Over-expensive, over-heated, loud, too many people, dirty with rats, home … There is a ton of great stuff here but everybody always lists that. I live where I live, downtown, because it’s alive and at the time was perfect for me.

I don’t live anywhere. I never have. I live temporarily with my daughters and their families and my beloved friends wherever we are together. I build and enjoy houses and in a short while I enjoy selling them. I enjoy experiencing different places. But I don’t think of home as real estate. That is why I live on my boat, “Strangelove.” When I want to move on I don’t have to pack my toothbrush. My home, my roots, are in the people I love. That is really the way it is.

My heart is rooted in Ireland, at a house called St. Clerans.
I am rooted nowhere. When my parents decide to expatriate themselves, they turn me into a bilingual floater who feels most at home when she can claim no fixed address. I have lived in forty different apartments and houses since I was eighteen: London, New York, Paris, London, Rome, Milan, Los Angeles, London, New York, Paris, New York, Paris, Santa Fe (four different places in five years) — and now, once more, in New York, where everything is moving all the time, and my friends from Paris, London, Rome, Milan, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe come to town. I bought a soaring loft a little over a year ago, moved in ten thousand books, family antiques, all the pictures and statues, only to discover that I didn’t feel at home. Last fall a radiator exploded in the middle of the night, so the insurance company moved me into a residence hotel — and suddenly, sleeping under a standard issue bedcover, bathing in a plastic bathtub, surrounded by generic furniture and mass-produced giclée prints of gardens, I suddenly felt like I’d come home. Now spring is here, the radiators are perfect, the loft is fixed, and I’m selling it.

We moved pretty often, too, when I was a child — four towns and eight homes by the time I was 17, all in the northeast, from Brooklyn to New Jersey. Those who move around a lot when young can get pluses (flexibility, the ability to travel light and start new) and minuses (a lack of stability, a tendency not to feel anchored). I was born in New York and have lived in the city or on the island most of my life. New York is beautiful and I love it. I love what Samuel Johnson called the busy hum of men, the sound of a city, in his case London. I love the air of mild anarchy. But there are other towns I have lived in that I also loved. Boston and what was, at the time, in the Seventies, its beatupness, its humanity, and is now, when I visit it, its gleamingness. It’s been washed clean by affluence. And Washington, beautiful Georgetown and handsome green Northwest and northern Virginia. I recently fell in love with Rome, and I love London. But I’m also just back from a trip to two places I always feel at home in and one new place that was a revelation to me. In Texas I was made happy by the flatness and warmth, and I love Texans and want to hold hands with them. I always feel this way in Texas. I want to get a ranch and have critters. In central California everything seemed bright and fresh and the farms were huge. I like places that continue to try to fend off the national culture and try to hold onto their own, and their own ways. I want to have a farm and be grateful for rain. Oklahoma City is such a proud town, they have so many people trying to make the place work, and cohere, and hold on to its history. And it does work and it is holding on to its history. After the bombing of the federal building 13 years ago, there was a terrible tornado that left devastation a mile wide. These twin traumas left Oklahoma City citizens rising up and forcing the best from themselves and triumphing in generosity. And the memorial at the bombing site is beautiful and serene and people have lunch there during the day. I saw a bunch of kids get college scholarship money after winning a local essay contest, and one of them was the fourth in his family to win the award, and he was homeschooled, mature and thoughtful and poised, which is the kind of kid good homeschooling tends to produce. I think the coming generation will yield up a lot of such young people. With a son at college, I feel like I’m in a time when I can move around more, and I mean to, and have begun. But to answer your question the place that is home for me is America. If I’m in the world and then come home to any American city I feel like I’m home. I put on the TV and hear the sound of: us.

I was raised in Beverly Hills so I have a natural affinity for California. The light is different there. And it’s where most of my memories live. When I land at LAX and see the palm trees from the air I always get misty. Home!

But somehow I’ve been able to replant my roots here in New York, and I truly can’t imagine living anywhere else now. Maybe it’s because both New York and I are Type-A personalities (and we keep the same hours). Maybe it’s because I can be in the middle of the action one second, and be snug at home only minutes later. Or maybe it’s just because Christmases in New York are pure magic. But the bottom line is: There’s a vibrancy and passion here that I feel nowhere else on earth.

And the view of Central Park from my balcony ain’t too shabby.

I’m homesick whenever and wherever I go when I’m away from New York City. I like it here. Most streets have sequential numbers, nothing matches here, the people don’t match — I like that. Polka dots go with plaids and you can wear black with blue. No one cares and I like that. Everyone gets the flu, rich and poor alike. I like that too. And at the Met Museum you pay what you can and the subway costs the same except for the young and old and I like that. And you should stop for red and go on green in my city and if you disobey you could get a ticket in a fancy car or a jalopy. I like that. And even though the nights can be scary, if you’re aware, you can walk home alone quite safely and there’s no other place with an all-night deli. And I really like my down quilt on my New York bed. I like that a lot.