This Saturday is Ohio State’s Homecoming Weekend, a weekend that culminates with a football match against Rutgers during which some hyper-socialized students will be recognized as Ohio State’s 2014 Homecoming Court. The game will otherwise be indiscernible from any other football match of the season, save for the TV break that coincides with the crowning of the Homecoming King and Queen. (There will be some other events throughout the weekend, and a parade, but I cannot fathom that these are anything but footnotes to those not directly involved in/with said events and parade.)
If one is to rank football games played in the Horseshoe, the home opener stands out every year, as do biannual versions of The Game and big opponent home-and-homes. The Homecoming Game ranks somewhere between Night Games and an early September game against a MAC school: depending on who you ask, it may or may not rank ahead of Alumni Band Day. This is to say that the stadium will be full, and loud, and happy. The crowd will feel at home, just as they do every time they walk onto campus.
They will be home because they feel at home, not because they will be told that they have come home.
The tricky thing about ’Home’ is that it can be a nebulous thing: home can be a place, a group, a person, a smell, or a sound. It could be the shell of its former self, no longer recognizable, or completely gone. Or it could remain unchanged and somehow no longer feel like home, not because it has changed but because you have changed.
home |hōm|
noun
1) the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household
• 1a) the family or social unit occupying a home
The Ohio State University is the Home of The Buckeyes. ‘Buckeyes’ here is a collective descriptor, a series of circles of varying size and overlap, a sort of multi-dimensional Venn diagram. The most publicly visible and scrutinized Buckeyes are the members of the football and basketball teams. The most fraught are students enrolled at the university, with the waiting future Buckeyes coming in a close second. The most powerful are the Board of Trustees. The oldest are the alumni. The biggest circle of all is the one containing those who did not attend the university but root for the sports teams.
To varying degrees, all of these people call the University home.
• 1b) (informal) a place where an object is kept
I have not lived in Ohio since I moved to Maryland to attend graduate school in 2006. Not long after moving, I went to rather contrived lengths to refer to Ohio as ‘Ohio’ and no longer refer to it as ‘home’: Ohio was where I grew up, but was not where I lived anymore and therefore was no longer ‘home’. (I similarly scrubbed the word ‘pop’ from my vocabulary in reference to soda. I firmly stand by that decision.) Some reasoning behind this was due to embarrassment, some of it due to an almost adolescent need to be living my own life, and some of it was due to being 22 years old. These things are all inter-related.
Over time, self-censoring of ‘home’ became less and less necessary: the discovery of our (my wife and my) enjoyment of living in DC was coupled with a decision to stay in the area after graduate school. That was followed by the purchase of a house and the birth of a child. And so, over time, ‘home’ has quite naturally become somewhere other than Ohio.
• 1c) a house or an apartment considered as a commercial property
A little over two years ago, we purchased a ninety-year old rowhouse in the District of Columbia. We moved into the house in mid-September (Arkansas got their shit kicked in by Bama that afternoon). I ran an ultramarathon that fall. A whole lot of life events were happening that fall and The Year of The Bowl Ban ended up largely being a series football games that I read about after the fact. I spent that first football season of home ownership going on long Saturday morning runs, restoring transom windows, touching up paint, and cleaning up old door hardware. One Saturday, I ran for eleven-plus hours. A few Saturdays after that, I sat on my ass and ate a lot of food.
Last fall, my wife was pregnant with our first child and I was training for one last marathon before the baby arrived. We I came to the conclusion that it would be my last summer/fall to learn new things for a long while, and so House Work/Hobby Saturdays became a thing. I exposed a brick wall with a masonry chisel and hammer over a series of Saturdays. The roof began leaking, so I climbed up onto the roof with a bucket of asphalt tar and fiberglass patch. I missed the Iowa game because of a wedding in Columbus; I watched Penn State get mauled at my local bar with an old college roommate who was in town. I watched the Purdue game on a friend’s couch the day before the New York City Marathon. I missed most of the Big Ten Championship Game while we hosted a baby shower in our home. The Orange Bowl happened two hours after our daughter was born. I still have not watched a single snap or highlight from that game. Housework was less hectic that season than the previous season, but life was more so.
This summer, the roof on our house failed to the point of needing replacement (read: I am not a roofing professional). Roof replacement was combined with kitchen renovation; life was designed in the Ikea Kitchen Planner. We attended the Navy game in Baltimore while staying at a friend’s house for two weeks, then moved back into our home a few days later. I laid kitchen tile the following Saturday and then watched the second half of the Virginia Tech game on my iPad while sitting between Ikea boxes and my yet-to-be-unpacked range. The following Saturday I did not see one second of the Kent State game because I was hanging cabinets with my father-in-law and wife’s uncle. I had the Cincinnati game on in the background while my father, grandfather, and I installed a sink, garbage disposal, dishwasher, and countertops. I decided to not attend the Maryland game to take a break and try to enjoy the kitchen. I made carne adovada tacos for lunch and two pizzas for dinner that Saturday. I even missed out on Ole Miss coming back and beating Bama because I was taking a pizza out of the oven.
This is all to say that I am finding that our home-and life in general-has, in many ways, replaced football on Saturdays. What I find surprising is that I am largely comfortable with that fact.
• 1d) a place where something flourishes, is most typically found, or from which it originates
Our daughter was born at Georgetown University Hospital. I will not forget this for a number of reasons, among them the fact that it struck me as very odd for a hospital to have pictures of Jackie Kennedy in the maternity ward until I remembered Catholicism and the Kennedys and This Town. Georgetown University Hospital is in the District of Columbia, and my daughter will live here for the foreseeable future. And, most saliently, she will live here solely because of her parents’ decision-making. This last point did not come to me until I had a child of my own: that we are where we are from because of factors wholly out of our own control. (It is through this same lens that I have begun to better understand my own parents, although the decision to live in Sandusky, Ohio vexes me to this very day.)
Ohio is where I am from, and that fact is something that I can not and—as I am coming to accept—need not escape. I grew up there because my parents decided to live there; I stayed in Ohio for college and attended Ohio State because it felt like home when I visited as a high school senior. I left Ohio because opportunities arose elsewhere; I do not plan to return because I do not see those same opportunities in Ohio. Still, whether it is or is not the mass around which I orbit does not change the fact that Ohio is where I have spent the vast majority of my life.
2) an institution for people needing professional care or supervision
There was a point sometime through my freshman year at OSU when I realized that my plans of going to medical school were misguided. A large influencing factor there was the neuroticism of the pre-med students, but there also were a few other people that kept drawing me towards a different path. All of them were faculty members in the Chemistry Department. I had one-on-one meetings with professors who seemed impossibly invested in my well-being. Their enthusiasm for chemistry and was infectious. As a result, I spent afternoons pre-reading organic chemistry textbooks while home on summer break.
At nineteen, I needed care and supervision. I got just that at Ohio State.
Ohio State is an gigantic institution with incredible levels of granularity; descriptors I’ve heard from friends who attended small schools is that it seems to be more city than college. That’s an accurate statement, and with that comes the corollary that there are a whole lot of people that make up the university. The thing is, from the inside, it doesn’t feel impossibly large: even though there were 55,000 students there, I passed the same ones on the way to class every day.
The size of Ohio State lends to the idea that it is a big family. A thing that I have come to understand about big families (I do not have one, but I have encountered some) is that there are always people within that large family that you love unconditionally and at the same time are embarrassed to be associated with. This description quite nicely applies to my relationship with some of my fellow Buckeyes—especially those who find the athletic teams to be more important than the University. Athletics are not the institution that cares and supervises and molds minds: the University does. I find that to be an important point: that the University is foundational for so many.
3) (sports) the goal or end point
This August, a few days before the demolition of our kitchen began, I spent 33 hours in Ohio. Five of those hours were spent with my parents and brother. Six were spent in the car. Of the remaining 22 hours, 16 were allotted for sleeping. I probably slept nine, because teething 7-month-olds don’t sleep well in a pack and play away from home.
The payoff, for me at least was four of those hours spent in Columbus seeing a friend off before he departed on a short tour of duty. A party was held for him in the Italian Village, a neighborhood that I had no idea existed during my time in Columbus. After a few hours of watching people in their late twenties eat foods she couldn’t eat and drink beverages she wasn’t allowed to drink, my daughter got restless, so we went for a walk around the Short North on an early evening in August to distract and entertain her. The sidewalks did not disappoint.
While we were looping back to the party past some of the old Victorian homes near Italian Village Park, I told my daughter that some day she will have a place that matters to her as much as Columbus means to her mother and I: that she’ll have somewhere where she meets her spouse, or her maid of honor, or her passion in life. That she’ll be able to look at that place—wherever it is—after she’s gone as a place where she feels at home, no matter how long it’s been since she was there or how much things have changed. She smiled.
A little bit later we got back to the party, and later still we got in the car and left Columbus.
This weekend, a hundred thousand people will travel to Columbus. They will celebrate and cheer with friends, family, strangers, and football players. They will cheer for Ohio State: their alma mater, the team they cheered for at home with their parents, or for the team that represents their home state.
For a few hours in the late afternoon, they all will be home together.
Denny Mayo graduated from The Ohio State University in 2006 and from the University of Maryland in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.
