Home in Iowa

When I was a child, I had moderately bad OCD. Not so much an aversion to germs or a set of superstitious rituals, but a painful anxiety related to perceived disorder and an urge to put things exactly right. That meant endless straightening (90-degree angles only), cleaning for the smallest specks of dust, going back time and again to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be. Beneath this mild affliction, I learned, is a hatred of disruption, of events spilling out unpredictably and — even worse — uncontrollably.

When the world feels hostile by its very changing nature, you attach a special importance to home. Your home base is where one can reliably retreat from life’s  vicissitudes. This is where things can stay the same, no matter how wild things get out there. There is security in the stasis. So, even as a child, I took care to ensure that my physical home was perfectly maintained.

As I got older, my OCD tapered off, and I became more temperamentally conservative. Eventually, I learned to fall in love with the world’s perpetual churn. That is what makes it fun, or at least exhilarating. In America, especially, the restlessness is the point. As I see it, it is conservative not to resist uncontrollable change, even when particular developments are unfortunate, but to accept it and move forward with events.

Now, I am enamored with, not discomforted by, the churn throughout the nation. That is partly why I went to school in Silicon Valley, which is trying again to reconfigure the global economy. And why, after seeing as much of America as I could on a post-graduation road trip, I am going to work in Washington to cover the gushing storm drain that is U.S. national politics.

Strangely, though, despite my personal progression, I still have the same rules for home as I did years ago. For me, home is Iowa, specifically Des Moines. This is where I yearn to return, wherever else I go. And I want it to stay exactly the same.

That’s impossible, of course. Iowa is a part of America, and America can’t quit moving. Yet Iowa seems to move perhaps more slowly than anywhere else in the country. The names on storefronts last a bit longer. Families stick around. People who grew up here tend to go off to see the world for a while, then come back to settle down. They send their children to the same high schools that they attended. Because they know there’s no better place to have a childhood.

Maybe I’m being romantic. Of course lots of places have parades and fireworks on the Fourth of July, with children chasing after tossed candy and dogs eating ice pops. We have deep-fried Oreos and pork chops and corn on the cob, but other places have their food traditions. Iowa can’t be the only place where strangers start up conversations when you walk down the sidewalk, or where a father and son would rather cut up a fallen tree themselves than call a company. It’s not the only place where houses have finished basements where a thousand infamous teenage stories transpired, where enough friends can still come back to fill it up again years later.

But even if everyone has some version of those things . . . Iowa is mine, and it always will be. Wherever I live, it will always be home.

That is why I lament when a beloved restaurant closes down, or familiar face moves away. And why I caught myself thinking, as I walked through my Des Moines neighborhood with my old dog on my last day there: Please, please don’t change. Be exactly like this when I come back.

I feel this way out of love now, no longer out of fear. Everyone, OCD or none, needs a home base.

This is an installment in a cross-country road-trip adventure.