I remember asking myself once, “what have I got if everything else gets taken away?” If I lose all my money, every single one of my possessions. What if I were to lose everything I’ve ever written, every photograph I’ve ever taken, what would I be left with? “My body and my brain,” I remember thinking. My health and my memories. The books I’ve read, the places I remember, the miles I’ve swum, cycled, and run.

But that was the wrong answer.

My flight didn’t arrive until midnight. I couldn’t sleep or get comfortable on the plane because of the painful sores on my back. By 1 a.m. I had cleared immigration and picked up my baggage. And soon, outside, there was Raman to pick me up, to give me a place to stay, to buy me beers and dinner.

Raman and I have been friends, roommates, brothers, enemies, travel partners. I’ve wanted to kill him countless times and I know he’s felt the same. But when I was down, he was there for me without any questions. Just like I would be for him.

When we lose everything, we’re left with much more than just ourselves. We’re left with the bonds of friendship and love that we’ve invested in. As we go through our lives and our choices reveal our priorities, it’s a lesson worth remembering. A lesson worth far more than two thousand dollars and 80 hours of lost work.

Coming from Caracas’ thick, humid smog, the salty sea air of Santa Monica is intoxicating. As is the autumnal sun and familiar, quiet roar of the ocean.

The first couple days I was still a little jumpy. Walking to the Apple store on Third Street Promenade, a shadow came up quickly behind me and immediately I turned around with a clinched fist just to find a pretty girl cycling by on her beach cruiser.

At the crosswalk a female police officer called out to a woman jaywalking right in front of her. The cop gave her an amiable look of mild disappointment. Then a homeless guy came up to the officer asking for directions, which she offered with a friendly smile while turning down the volume on her walkie talkie.

I’m as guilty of cop-hating as the next 20-something liberal, but looking at the officer do her job I was overcome with a rare sensation of something nearing patriotism. Yes, American cops misuse their power, but not nearly like what frequently occurs in other countries.

My work was very supportive and gave me time off to relax and get back to normal. One morning I ducked into a news stand and bought the premier issue of Good magazine. The theme of the first issue isn’t what you’d expect from a cosmopolitan, liberal magazine: “I Love America.” It features celebrated writers like James Surowiecki, Gary Schteyngart, and Neal Pollack. All contemplating why they love America and why they want to make it better. Each article spoke to me. Definitely recommended.

I also had the time to finish a novel I’ve been reading for far too long: Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain. What follows is an excerpt that probably won’t be of interest to anyone other than me, but reading the last hundred pages of the book (written in 1943) was like reading my own thoughts before I was able to get them down on paper.

Well, where is home? he said. It isn’t where your family comes from, and it isn’t where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat.) Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where you want to be buried yourself, choosing the garage or the barn or the woodshed in order not to mess up the house, but coming back anyway to the last sanctuary where you can kill yourself in peace?

Still feeling good, bubbling with the sun and wind and the freedom of movement, the smell of the burning oil in the motor like a promise of progress to his nostrils, he let himself envy the people who had all those things under one roof. To belong to a clan, to a tight group of people allied by blood and loyalties and the mutual ownership of closeted skeletons. To see the family vices and virtues in a dozen avatars instead of in two or three. To know always, whether you were in Little Rock of Menton, that there was one place to which you belonged and to which you would return. To have that rush of sentimental loyalty at the sound of a name, to love and know a single place, from the newest baby-squall on the street to the blunt cuneiform of the burial ground …

Those were the things that not only his family, but thousands of Americans had missed. The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations. Why remain in one dull plot of earth when Heaven was reachable, was touchable, was just over there? The whole race was like the fir tree in the fairy-tale which wanted to be cut down and dressed up with lights and bangles and colored paper, and see the world and be a Christmas tree.

…

How did a tree sink roots when it was being dragged behind a tractor? Or was an American expected to be like a banyan tree or a mangrove, sticking roots down everywhere, dropping off rooting appendages with lavish fecundity.

…

Was he going home, or just to another place? It wasn’t clear. Yet he felt good, settling his bare arm gingerly on the hot door and opening his mouth to sing. He had a notion where home would turn out to be, for himself as for his father - over the next range, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, that place of impossible loveliness that had pulled the whole nation westward, the place where the fat land sweated up wealth and the heavens dropped lemonade …

On the Big Rock Candy Mountain
Where the cops have wooden legs,
And the handouts grow on bushes,
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs,
Where the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the cinder ducks are blind -
I’m a-gonna go
Where there ain’t no snow,
Where the rain don’t fall
And the wind don’t blow
On the Big Rock Candy Mountain