Another poignant return in Cyprus

This is another of those stories that brings tears to my eyes as I read it: "Greek family has bittersweet return to Cyprus home now inhabited by Turks." I am still finding it amazing that there has been so little rancour and so much good will in these encounters. This confirms what my father had told me for so many decades about the normal relationships between the two communities in his youth. One cannot help thinking that all this has to have some political effect. If the leaders of the two sides do not come together soon, the popular momentum will have passed them by.

I have a recurring dream in which my wife and I have bought the little three-bedroom house in Wheaton, Illinois, where I lived and grew up between 1958 and 1968. The inside seems larger than it actually was, and the basement is a huge cavernous expanse beneath the house with room after room, sometimes still containing the toys I played with as a child.

In recent years, during visits to my hometown, we've driven by the house, and I've been sorely tempted to knock on the door and ask to go in. Whether we would be greeted as courteously as Turkish Cypriots have greeted inquiring Greek Cypriots I don't know. My guess is that no one would be home, as virtually everyone now works during the day.

But at least I am able to get near this house, to go to the old neighbourhood, to see the elementary school I attended, to see the creek running behind the house, and the old vacant lot in back which is now occupied by two newer houses.

Yet I find myself wondering whether the 800 kilometres that separates me from my hometown is not, after all, that much different from a barbed-wire fence. The effect is the same: I am here, the old neighbourhood is there. Is modern North American mobility itself tantamount to a kind of repeated exile, where people are forced to uproot themselves every few years for the sake of the market, thus abandoning homes, family and friends?

Cyprus is a small island. North America is a huge expanse of territory. In some respects I wish we lived in a smaller country.