In eight days, I’ll be aboard an airplane to Chicago, and shortly after that, the whole experience of living as an American overseas comes to an end for my wife and I as we sign a lease on a place in Austin and see how home looks with fresh eyes.

Something that comes up from time to time, especially with friends who are at home and haven’t had the chance to live abroad yet is whether I’m sad to be going, to have a big adventure like this one must surely have been wind down. And sometimes I feel bad about it, like I haven’t appreciated it enough, but the answer’s no, not sad at all. But I can be kinda a neurotic dude, and so the question is, like, should I be?

Two things on this.

One, home is a concept that doesn’t get enough play among people who’ve made it a point to blow out of the town they grew up in and did their best to stay away. It can feel like a dirty word- like the two poles are home/boring and away/exciting, and you’re choosing the former. But I was talking with a new friend a couple weeks ago, a guy named Archie. He’s from Zimbabwe, but he’s lived in the UK for a decade, came over as a teenager. He started in Glasgow and came to London five years ago. He asked if I got home often, and I told him that I’d be returning for good pretty soon, and he nodded, a little jealous. “If I could,” he said, “if there were a job that paid even a fraction of this for me back home, I would go tomorrow.” We all know how realistic that dream is, but it struck me that if home, as a concept, holds such appeal for a guy who’s had most of his adult life to get used to living away, and the place that he came from is as unstable as Zimbabwe, then there’s no reason to feel like looking forward to going back is anything to feel bad about.

(I told him to come to Texas instead. What the hell? There’s plenty of room, and you know how well-accepted Anglicized African men are in the Lonestar State.)

Two, I saw this video on Bob Harris’ blog today:

It’s from a disability awareness night at Fenway Park that the Red Sox sponsored a little while back. They invited a young man with Autism to sing “The Star Spangled Banner”, and around “whose broad stripes and bright stripes”, he sort of lost the words and started giggling. And the entire crowd, 38,000 sports fans who were there to watch a ballgame, came in to help him out.

Because while America’s the place where silent majority campaigns and dog whistle attacks are designed to cater to people at their worst, the people at their best can be pretty fucking remarkable. And going back to that isn’t anything to feel bad about.