Is home where Skype is?

Home is a tricky place to put your finger on.

Is it where you were born? Where you grew up? Or is home where ever you wake up in the morning, before you go off to work, to earn money, in an age when none of that, it seems, can be taken for granted?

That’s one of the questions explored by Susan J. Matt in her new book, Homesickness: An American History.

Every day, people all over the planet leave home in search of the same thing: better lives.

According to an opinion piece Matt wrote in the New York Times last week, 1.1 billion people — one quarter of the world’s adults — want to go abroad temporarily to find more profitable work. Another 630 million would like to move abroad permanently.

That’s a lot of people looking for better lives.

And what Matt writes about is not the opportunities presented by leaving home, but the cost. It doesn’t come so much in dollars and cents, but rather in heartaches.

“In nearly a decade’s research into the emotions and experiences of immigrants and migrants,” she wrote, “I’ve discovered that many people who leave home in search of better prospects end up feeling displaced and depressed. Few speak openly of the substantial pain of leaving home.”

No one understands that better than our city, where people from all over the planet are migrating to, thanks to our well above average economy.

At my son’s school in Sunnyside, over the past few years, I’ve met parents who hail from Turkey, Algeria, Argentina, Winnipeg, and Hungary.

If I got a chance to talk to all the parents from all six grades, Sunnyside School, with all of a couple hundred students, might well resemble a mini-united Nations.

On the other hand, in a Facebook- and Skype-connected world, it sometimes feels as if, to paraphrase the wonderfully loopy Jim Jarmusch picture Stranger Than Paradise, wherever you go, there you are.

Thanks to technology, you never really have to feel as if you’ve left the room, let alone your entire past.

And places often look the same, no matter where you are. There’s a Burger King in downtown Paris and Starbucks in Shanghai. You can sit in an Internet cafe in Nepal and tweet Instagrams of the Himalayas in real time that we can download the same moment in Calgary and compare to Banff.

“Technology also seduces us into thinking that migration is painless,” writes Matt. “Ads from Skype suggest that ‘free video calling makes it easy to be to- gether, even when you’re not.’

“The comforting illusion of connection,” she adds, “offered by technology makes moving seem less consequential, since one is always just a mouse click or a phone call away.”

I always think that home is where people get your jokes — no matter where that might be.

And sometimes, even home shifts shape so much, it gets hard to recognize.

The other day, walking the dog, I stumbled across a front end loader knocking down one of those little 1950s bungalows that are being knocked down and replaced with expensive townhouses in neighbourhoods across the city.

There was nothing memorable about the bungalow. It had probably outlived its usefulness. Those infills are pretty nice, if you can afford them.

But watching the front end loader just smash and crash a little house into bits and bites was weird and sad. It was like watching a city get mugged.

I didn’t have any memories invested in it, but how many people did? How many lives were lived, over the course of that bungalow’s lifespan? How many babies raised there? How many lives came to end?

For everyone who lived in that vanished bungalow, home just got a little trickier to define.

Now imagine that instead of urban redevelopment, you fled a war or natural disaster that shredded your old home into something unrecognizable.

Just remember: as a Calgarian, you’ve been unofficially designated an ambassador to a whole new world for someone who just got here, from 10 or 12 time zones, two or three languages, and maybe a deity or two away from what passes for standard practice around here.

If you see them standing around looking for a Skype portal they can stare into, walk over and welcome them home.