There is one thing in my life that, for better or for worse, I cannot change, one thing that has powerfully shaped my sense of identity, that I am rootless. Born in Pasadena, raised in Philadelphia, in town and in suburbs, then scattered across midwest and northeast in adolescence.

Grade four: Oakmont School, Havertown, Pennsylvania; best friend, Hunter Clouse; no girlfriend. Grades five and six: Red Cedar School, East Lansing, Michigan; best friend, Carlos Malferrari, girlfriend, Pam Nystrom. Grade seven: Huntingdon Junior High School, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; best friend, Stephen Katz, girlfriend, Liz. Grade eight: East Lansing Junior High School, East Lansing, Michigan; best friend, David Backstrom, girlfriend, Kathy Lockwood. Grade nine: Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School, Hamilton, Massachusetts; best friend, Charlie Barker, girlfriend, Holly Cone.

Six years, five different homes, five different schools. Dear friends made and lost. Always letting go. Always starting over. Always the new kid. No place to be from. No companions to grow up with. No extended family because half of the extended family is half a country away and the other half is a whole country away and I know little, so little of their stories.

Who are you? Where are you from? Who are your people? Where is your home?

        “O Lord, you have always been our home.”

The Lord has been my home. From the age of four, I have known that before I was my mother’s son, before I was my father’s son, I am a child of God. That is where I live and breathe and have my being, in a space, spiritual and material, that is God’s own creation. Everything I see, I see through that lens. Everything I am or strive to be is measured against that sense of belonging.

For better or for worse. I am grateful, so grateful, for always being home, always being held in God’s embrace wherever I am, whatever may befall me. I am grateful, so grateful for a rich and varied life, for friends from Brazil and India and Argentina and Liberia, Jewish and Mormon and Hindi and Buddhist, musicians and athletes and scholars and thespians.

But I crave roots. I crave a human identity: ethnic or cultural, familial or regional. Which is why I was thrilled to discover, among my father’s papers, years after his death, a genealogy and family tree researched and published the year I was born by a cousin of my father’s mother, Jessie Laing Sibbet. Nearing the age of seventy, after retiring from my life’s work, after traveling three times to Scotland and falling in love with the land and its people, I have learned what I never knew, that I am one quarter Scottish, that my people come from Markinch in Kirkcaldy, that there is a place from which I come, at least from which a part of me comes.

I am hungry and thirsty to know more, to let this wanderer see where the journey began, to push down roots, to lay claim to a home, which though never was nor never will be where I live, is mine.