How I Learned the Meaning of “Home”.

Home.

My grandmother was married seven times. They all died.

But this story is not about my grandmother. It is about how I learned the meaning of Home.

My grandmother lived in a place called Leisure World.
It wasn’t an assisted living facility, they all had nice homes and a clubhouse where they would get together to gossip and have coffee and cinnamon rolls.

I still remember the cinnamon rolls.

They also, apparently, had a healthy- well, not that healthy it turned out-supply of eligible bachelors of a certain vintage and financial status.
My grandmother was a brassy redhead thanks to her weekly visit to her “beauty parlor” who was what many in those days called “a pistol.”
In other words she knew how to work it.
So one of those bachelors would become my grandfather for a couple of years and then he’d drop dead of natural causes.

My grandmother would then inherit a boatload of money and use it to take me, her only grandson, on a grand tour of Europe. And by grand tour I mean really grand. She’d explain the extravagance by telling me “Ronny, we have to get rid of all these ill gotten gains, don’you kno’.” She was Scottish.

So that’s how it was: Wedding, funeral, travel, repeat. I gave her away at two of the weddings!

You see, all my life I have suffered under the heartbreaking stigma of being ridiculously over privileged.

And part of it was that at a very young age the best thing that could possibly happen happened: my parents got divorced.
My mom got the house and my dad moved to a boat in Marina del Rey. This meant I had two homes. Either parent gave me problems I’d bicycle over to the other one. It was perfect.

But then my mom met the guy with a big handlebar mustache who was very good at construction and he become my step dad. My real dad was off sowing his oats as I would later do at his age.
That’s when I became homesless. (I only had one.)

And my mom and step dad started flipping houses. They’d buy a house, we’d move in, fix it up, sell it and buy another house, repeat. So I didn’t really have a home, more of a rotating costruction site.

This also meant that I between 5th and 10th grades I changed schools eleven times. So I got really good at making friends- fast! But not getting too attached. Which was the perfect training for what I would later become: an actor.

My other passion was basketball.

My mother tells this story about me every thanksgiving. She drove me over to the new school I would be enrolling in. It was a Sunday and no one was around. I asked her to stop by the playground, got out, went over to the basketball court and peed on the pole. Made sense to me. I was marking my territory. This was where I would make my new friends. That basketball court would be my home.

Back to my grandmother. She used to read me stories. She read me The Hobbit, playing all the parts, doing all the voices. We got to the last page and she asked if I wanted to hear Lord of the Rings next. ‘What else you got” I asked. ‘You might like this” she said and pulled a thick book she had on a pedestal along with her Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary.

As soon as I heard “When shall we three meet again, In thunder, lightning or in rain” I was hooked. It had sword fights and witches and people being “untimely ripped” and from that moment on all I wanted to be was a Shakespearean actor.

And after more than a hundred and fifty plays- a majority of them Shakespeare, I think I can say I became one. To this day, when I’m reading or, better yet performing Shakespeare I feel like I am the- I don’t know- the dream speaker of the tribe. So for many years, Shakespeare became my home.

And then I ran away with the circus. Through a series of fortunate events I became a lead clown with Cirque du Soleil, touring the world for seven years. If you asked me then where my home was I’d say it was centerstage of the big top making friends with three thousand strangers ten shows a week.
But my real home was a hotel room with a microwave, a bed and (if it was our usual Oakwood housing) the same brown vase with dried flowers on the table.

But while on tour in Japan I met the love of my life, Momo.
I had gathered enough money to buy a warehouse in Emeryville not far from the Marina. I asked her to marry me and come live with me in the US.
To leave her home and make one with me. And beyond thankfully, she said yes.
And we would go back to Japan every year to stay with her grandmother- her obaasan, who is ninety six by the way, doing fine and lives on her own in her four hundred year old home.

But the pandemic came and getting over there just didn’t work out for four long years. One night Momo and I lay in bed staring at the ceiling discussing it- the scheduling- how it wasn’t worth risking obaasan’s health, etcetera- and I apologized that we might not make it over ’til the next year. That Momo would have to wait to see home again. And I’ll never forget, she rolled towards me, put my face in her hands and said “You are my home.”

And I said “And you’re mine.”