A long goodbye to Amsterdam

How do you know if you really belong somewhere, or anywhere at all?

What’s the longest you’ve ever lived anywhere in your life? For me it’s nine years, here in Amsterdam. It will be well over a decade by the time I move to Italy to start the bookshop of my dreams.

This kind of radical settling down is an anomaly for me. My adult life prior to Amsterdam took place against a shifting international backdrop. I turned 21 on a study-abroad semester in Syria, and I guess it set a pattern of always yearning to be elsewhere. The “Home Sweet Home” page of the family website my husband keeps as our family photo album lists 21 different homes during our first ten years of marriage.

I have to go back to my childhood for the next-longest place I lived: Woodland, California, site of my childhood library. Seven years, from age ten to seventeen.

We moved to Woodland when my dad took his first job as a newly-minted doctor. So I think my parents kind of meant it as the place where our family would settle down. We moved across town a couple of years after that, but I count all seven years as one place, since everything but our house stayed the same.

Still, I never really felt at home in Woodland. To this day, it isn’t a place I own up to being from, even though, like I said, before Amsterdam it was the longest I’d ever lived in one place. Before Woodland, we’d moved several times already, so I guess by the time we got there I’d internalized the belief that I didn’t really belong anywhere.

I was born in Utah, where my parents met. When I was two years old, my dad was accepted to medical school in San Diego. So San Diego is the first place I remember living. It’s also the place I learned that no matter how much you feel at home, it doesn’t mean you’ll be allowed to stay.

As a child, San Diego was my whole world. It’s an easy place to fall in love with: balmy weather all year round, hummingbirds buzzing by lush bottlebrush and bougainvillea, Spanish Colonial white walls and terracotta roofs. The beach. Blue skies. The San Diego Zoo. I could have lived there happily forever. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

Then in 1986 occurred a world-shaking catastrophe that no doubt everyone but my five-year-old self foresaw: my dad graduated from medical school.

Which meant the unthinkable: we would have to move away.

This news made no sense at all to me. I could not imagine living elsewhere. My life was here, had always been here, as far back as I remembered. How could we leave?

Besides which, that year the San Diego Zoo was turning 70. To celebrate, they had begun releasing a set of limited edition pins featuring a different animal for each month that you visited. I treasured these pins. We had season passes to the zoo and went all the time; certainly often enough to collect a pin each month. Moving away from San Diego halfway through the year meant my collection would remain forever incomplete.

A vintage 1980s San Diego Zoo pin. It’s for sale on Etsy if you want it.

I suppose my animal pin collection was how my child-self summed up everything I was about to lose: my sense of belonging to San Diego, my feeling that I deserved to be there. I was a local; I was in the know. And I had the pins to prove it. What would life be like outside the only place I’d ever considered home? Who would I be?

One night around the time all this was going down, my dad took me to the parking lot outside the 2-bedroom UC San Diego student apartment where we lived. He stood next to me and pointed out a glittery smudge in the sky: Halley’s Comet.

I was barely old enough to understand what I was seeing, let alone the vastness of time and space it represented. Next time the comet returned, he said, I’d be in my eighties. I tried to imagine searching the skies for the comet again, with a lifetime of memories behind me. Unlike the adults all around me, for whom this would be a one-time midlife event, I was destined to see this comet twice; Halley’s Comet would bookend my life. It made me and the comet both feel special—a magical thing reaching down from the cosmos to touch me.

As I remember it, the comet was THE major news event at the time. And it was more exciting even than that. There were astronauts who would be going up to see it from space! The idea of such a journey blew my five-year-old mind.

Then it blew my mind again. Fire. Disaster. Tragedy.

On January 28, 1986, the televised explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger brought me face to face with death; the reality of it, the permanence. The single detail that lodged in my mind was a charred glove found weeks later off the coast of Florida—a remnant of a flight suit, they said.

Where was the astronaut’s hand, I wondered. Where was the astronaut? I knew the answer, more or less, but at the same time couldn’t quite let myself know. On some level I could not understand how in an instant a person could become debris.

What an awful word, debris. “Remains” was another word I learned around that time. The words in the news as it trickled in were euphemisms that somehow made it worse. One day I was following a grand vicarious adventure. The next, I learned the world is full of danger. Reaching for the stars comes at a cost.

(Every so often I go back and read news articles and other documentation of the Challenger disaster. I’ve never re-encountered this glove. Maybe what I heard back then was some hint of how the astronauts were found, in pieces, floating in the sea. Maybe it was too awful for a child to comprehend. Maybe I made a severed hand into a glove.)

I was afraid for a long time after that, afraid of rockets and of space. Thinking about such things filled me with foreboding. This manifested itself more often than you might think. When I went to the library, for instance, the books had stickers on their spines so you could tell at a glance which genre they belonged to. Sherlock Holmes with a pipe for mysteries. A unicorn for fantasy. And a rocket for science fiction. The library was the center of my world, so anything on those shelves took on huge significance. For years, I would shudder in horror from that rocket, denying a creeping curiosity over what might be inside those books.

I guess in the grand scheme of things, a phobia of outer space is one of the easiest to manage. Just don’t go there. But the feeling was bigger than that, wider. It was recognition that terrible things do happen, that the worst things you imagine really can go wrong.

And for whatever reason, the Challenger Disaster remained melded in my mind to leaving San Diego. That, after all, was the point where everything went wrong.

I don’t think I ever said this out loud to anyone, but for many years afterward, that move became the thing I blamed for anything—large or small—that went wrong in my life. If only we hadn’t left San Diego, I would think. As if in some alternate timeline I’d stayed in San Diego and Christa McAuliffe lived to a ripe old age. In that other world, the sun always shone, and nothing could go amiss.

Turns out this irrational belief was so foundational to my psyche that when I got married and my husband and I were deciding where to move for the first time in our adult lives, we chose San Diego. Looking back, it’s obvious that on some level I still believed that if I only got back there, everything would reset, all wrongs would right, and life would be one long sunset on the beach.

My husband and I in our 4th anniversary photoshoot at La Jolla Cove in San Diego

Unaccountably, that didn’t happen. Life being life, there were ups and downs in San Diego, as anywhere. So I dreamed up a different promised land. Seventeen moves and four countries later, I found myself in my therapist’s office, admitting that I’ve spent my whole life chasing the perfect place.

Of course, that was right before I unironically told her that all it would take to fix everything was one more move.

To Italy, this time.

What, you might ask at this point, is in such desperate need of fixing? What in the world is wrong with Amsterdam?

Nothing, my friends. Nothing. Champagne problems. Amsterdam, by practically any measure, is one of the most liveable cities in the world. It’s full of beautiful green spaces, there’s excellent public transport, the airport is thirty minutes by bus from my house. I ride my bike almost everywhere, enjoy high-quality, reasonably-priced healthcare, and amazing public schools. My daughter’s tuition at University of Amsterdam is €2,601 per year. There are five different grocery stores within two blocks of my house, and a dozen charming cafés within the same radius.

I’m convincing even myself by now. But also, I still want to move to Italy.

We’ve been together for nine happy years, Amsterdam. I think we can both agree it’s not you, it’s me. I have a novelty-seeker personality, which is to say I’m a “Discovery Person,” as Gregory Garretson put it this week, his version of the personality trait “openness to experience.” Which, as he points out, is no doubt a major factor in why I have successfully moved to Europe, if by success you mean having been on the Continent for nearly a decade with no plans to leave.

But at some point novelty becomes familiarity. Which leads to the paradox that the very thing that suited you for adaption to an alien environment is the one that prods you into wanting to move on. I’ve been here, done this. And I start craving something new. Also, there’s that old bugbear: just like everywhere I’ve lived before, I’ve never really felt like I belong here. Maybe I’ll belong somewhere new . . .

By now I know I could chase belonging for a lifetime and never catch it. But do you know why two years after I moved to Amsterdam I took the drastic (for me) step of tattooing a map of the city on my body?

I felt at home here in a particular way I’d never felt at home before. Amsterdam is a place where it’s normal not to be from here. Over a third of this city was born abroad. On any given week in my neighborhood I hear half a dozen languages. Sure, maybe I don’t belong here, but at least I’m in good company.

For various reasons, my son’s injury last month means we won’t be moving to Italy next summer. (Not never, just not now.) For the next while, our house in Narni will remain a holiday home. Don’t worry, I’ll still be working on my bookshop in the meantime. But my long goodbye to Amsterdam just got a little longer.

Do you know what else? Halley’s comet reached its aphelion last year. It’s on its way back to us. And maybe I have some figuring out to do before it comes back.

I guess this means I should take my therapist’s gentle hint to consider why I always seem to think that the solution to any feeling must be moving somewhere new. Wherever you go, there you are, and all that. Maybe stop dragging yourself up by the roots, and bloom for awhile where you’ve chosen to plant yourself? Even if you sometimes feel like the fig tree on my tower roof in Italy . . .