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By
Leonard Zwelling
This is the last blog before Election Day. So, let’s not talk about politics any more. For the most part, the die is cast. I suspect by the end of this week we will know who will be the next President of the United States, for better or for worse. Don’t you want to know how close it will really be? I do. My greatest wish is that whoever wins, a peaceful transition is realized. The loser actually concedes. The country moves one by Thanksgiving.
I am writing this traveling back from Hawaii on October 26. The BW had a meeting in Honolulu and I tagged along to play golf.
When I travel from a great distance back to Houston, I think about the fact that for the first twenty years of my life I lived between very narrow borders.
I was born in Connecticut and that’s about as far north as I ever went in my first twenty years. My world was bordered on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south Durham, North Carolina, and to the west Zanesville, Ohio where my father’s family was from and where my paternal grandparents lived. We regularly drove there for Thanksgiving or Passover from the home in which I was raised on Long Island. For twenty years, that was my world.
In August of 1968, I flew across the country for the first time and drove with a fraternity brother from Beverly Hills back to the east where he was to attend law school. Yes, that one.
Since then, my world expanded—north to Alaska, west to Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, east to Turkey and Israel, and south to the tips of South America and Africa. I have enjoyed the traveling although that which I used to do when I was an academic scientist giving talks all over the country wore me down at times. However, some of those talks got me to exotic places like Toulouse, France and Wurzberg, Germany so no complaints from me.
But of all the places I have gone, now more than ever, my favorite place is home.
Since I went to college, I have only had a few homes—Durham, Washington, DC, and Houston. I have loved them all, but none more than Houston. For me, that Texas saying is true. I wasn’t born here, but I got here as fast as I could.
It seems, as I have gotten older, my need for travel has waned and my need to stay put is greater than ever. There’s a routine to my life. Exercise, golf, reading, writing. Those things mean the most to me and I do them best in Houston.
Twice during my time in Houston, I felt lost there. The first time was when I got fired as a vice president and had to reignite my career at age 59. That’s when I got the fellowship in Washington and worked on Capitol Hill for a year. Home that year was a 600-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment on 5th Street Northwest. It was home, but my wife wasn’t there and it was a place to sleep only. It didn’t feel like home. I got back to Houston as fast as I could.
Then I got fired again from Legacy Community Health. Is there a pattern here? Of course, there is. Readers of this blog know that I am never satisfied with the way things are. I want change and I want it fast. Usually too fast for any entrenched bureaucracy in a large organization.
I felt a little lost then again. However, had I not been fired, I never would have finished the three books I have published nor written the new novel on which my co-author and I are working. I was home most of the time now and I was able to write there better than anywhere.
Now, at 76, travel is harder. Airports seem to be getting larger and the walks more difficult. Car rental companies are dysfunctional and hotels, well, they’re not home.
So, as I return from another vacation, I ask myself what exactly it is that I need a vacation from? I get to be home. There is nowhere else that I would rather be.
I hope everyone voted or will. Remember, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.
And no matter who wins, everyone will want to complain about something.
America. It’s a great country.
