In search of my 'Heimersdorf'

"Keep my stuff in a closet or something upstairs," I told my father just before I left for Princeton freshman year.

I guess he didn't hear me. When I returned to Los Angeles four months later, they were gone. Against my wishes, my family had decided to pack my books, my clothes, my trophies and my childhood into nondescript boxes, and stored them in the tool shed in the backyard. My old room bore no evidence of its former state. Instead, it was a bedroom for a girl, my sister.

I shouldn't have been surprised. I never was quite at home in my father's house, or at least I never got comfortable with the idea of being a member of the household. I had moved in only two years before, during the summer before junior year of high school. When I got there, I didn't know anyone. Not my father, not anybody else I was required to live with for the next few years — my stepmother and my two half-siblings. The last time I had seen my father was when I was in second grade. My sister and my brother didn't even know I existed.

It was like moving to another country. I remember the awkward moment when I arrived at Los Angeles International Airport to be greeted by a stranger who I was to call my father. And I remember the fight we had two months later, when I told him he was the worst father anybody could have. He threw an empty bottle at me but purposely missed — I stormed out of the house and didn't return for a couple of hours. When I did, all cried out, my stepmother came into my room and talked with me.

It was the first true conversation I had with my new family in my new home.

Yet those moments were few and far in between. When someone would ask where I'd like to go for college, I'd respond confidently, "I'd like to go back to New Jersey."

New Jersey was far away from California. And I had grown up in New Jersey, living in my mother's house. I was used to New Jersey; I rejoiced at the thought of going to school in the state for four years. (Ask me why now, and I'll wonder. Perhaps things look better 3,000 miles away, or better yet, the heart grows fonder with time.)

And besides the summer after freshman year, I haven't really returned to Los Angeles. It's not that I like to stay at Princeton — because sometimes I think I don't — but that I think I like to find other places to live.

I split my time last summer between two places in Germany. For two months I lived in a sublet apartment in Frankfurt. For another month I was a guest at a host family's house in Heimersdorf, a small village north of Cologne. Every day, with my Discman and Matchbox 20 'Mad Season' CD in hand, I'd ride the U-Bahn from Heimersdorf to Cologne. When the subway appeared above ground, I'd peer out the window and wonder if I could possibly make Cologne or some other place in Germany my home.

In the end, I decided Heimersdorf was not the place for me. It was too dull, it was too full of old people. (It might also be that my host, who first appeared to be a loving German grandmother, turned out to be a great . . . well, witch. On the most basic level, she would charge me one mark — about 50 cents — per five-minute shower. Then again, perhaps it was just a misunderstanding from the cultural or generational gap.)

My American friends and I used to poke fun at the ridiculous-sounding name, "Heimersdorf," which seemed to indicate the backwardness of the place to us.

If we weren't so ignorant, we would have realized the meaning of Heimersdorf. In German — or at least in my shaky and imaginative version of the language — the name roughly translates to "a village of people who call it home." Heimersdorf was obviously a place some very normal people (perhaps people not as sophisticated as my American friends and I pretended to be, but people nevertheless) are happy to call home. Each day, on my way to the U-Bahn, all I saw were smiles from Germans, who were supposed to be stoic-like.

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This summer I will be away from Los Angeles once more. Next year will be my last at Princeton. And this is what really scares me: I've convinced myself quite successfully that I like to travel and explore new places.

But where will I really go next? I've lived in the Philippines, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, New York, New Jersey and Germany. Yet I haven't lived in my own Heimersdorf.

Rob Laset '02 is an Executive Editor from Arcadia, Calif.

'A Glimpse Within' is a weekly column in which we ask members of the Princeton community to share personal experiences. The 'Prince' welcomes submissions of about 650 words to The Newsroom.