Hobbits and Home-sickness

"Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.” - Charles Dickens

Bethany and I watched "The Hobbit" yesterday at the movie theater. It summoned a lot of latent memories and a mild case of homesickness.  At least half the Dwarfs sounded as if they had grown up near my hometown.

Ulster-Scots certainly has a distinctive brogue that just warms the heart of this immigrant when he hears that familiar brogue being spoken by some fantasy characters in a movie adaptation of one of his favorite authors.

America is so embracing of it's immigrants from the Isles that it is common enough to discover that my American friends have forgotten the fact that I'm not American. 
I confess that I'm so comfortable in America that I find it easy to forget that I'm not American! Then an accent is heard in a movie that brings back "home" with a thud, or I enter a discussion and discover yet another profound difference between how my Northern Irish culture thinks in comparison to how my new adoptive American culture thinks.

You just never know where that first step might take you, and like Bilbo Baggins I find that I've long since taken the steps on an adventure from which I can never return to being the 32 year old Northern Irishman who set out on an adventure 10 years ago.

"You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right."  ~ Maya Angelou

Home truly can conjure the most fantastic feelings and thoughts. But as Maya, (a more famous citizen of St. Louis) so eloquently said in the quote above "you can't really leave so it is ok, that you also can't really go back."

I do hope all of my friends, wherever we all are, find in this new year all that they dream it will be.