I'll have to admit, for much of the current year, I have not been very well grounded, and things aren't likely to change any time soon.  I have found myself up in the air about almost everything much more than usual, and I place the blame squarely on three primary culprits.  They are Delta, American, and USAirways.  Through it all, I am finding it quite difficult to remain anchored with my feet planted firmly on the ground when I constantly find myself either cruising at 30000 feet, or landing at final destinations, which are strange and unfamiliar.  I have become, in the most literal sense of the word, flighty.  No wonder my head's so often in the clouds.

In almost all ways, I am a man of routine.  I have a hunch that most runners are, as running requires a lot of it.  On a daily basis, I am most at peace with the simplicities of life.  My desire is to wake up in my own bed before the sun comes up, run on my own roads before work, watch Jeopardy while snuggling with my wife in the evening after dinner, and then tucking myself in bed by 9:30, eager to follow the same predictable schedule the next day.  On weekends, I like to start my Saturdays with a race, and then run down by the Chattahoochee River on Sundays.  Routine is not such a bad thing, and the routine of home is the finest routine I know.  I have devout fondness for home, and my running seems to like it too. 

When I'm at home, I know I can wake up at 5 in the morning, and the roads I run are a footstrike away, just past the end of my driveway.  As I gently step over the dew-drenched newspaper, I can go as far as my legs and my imagination are willing to take me, and I have the comfort of knowing that the finish line will always take me back home.   I don't require such trivial things as house falling on a wicked witch or a yellow brick road, or a pair of ruby red slippers to know my biggest happiness is found right in my own back yard. 

The last couple of weeks, my travels have returned me to places of my past, as I have returned to Wilmington, Delaware and Pittsburgh, PA.  I used to live in both cities, and in fact, I was born in Wilmington.  At one time or another, I called both places home, but neither trip was a return to any place even remotely similar.  The physical structures where I once lived might still be standing, but the comfort of my routine was left behind in Atlanta.

A house is merely a structure, cold and stoic.  But the warmth and the familiarity of home IS structure, in its most pure and simple form.  So two weeks ago, when I was in Wilmington, I went searching, not for a house, but for home.  I found it, but not in the residence where I was born.  Instead, I found it in a 2 ½ mile loop down by the Delaware River, where I found home for about an hour each morning on my run, before going to work.  As I traversed the roads that ran along the river and through Brandywine Park, the structure of home appeared.  Within the run, I was home, and it made the rest of the day more than just a little bit better.

This week in Pittsburgh, I once again found routine, this time along the Golden Triangle.   I never did make it back to the physical structure in which I once lived, but there was really no need to.  Every morning, I made a date to find my way back home by the waters of my three friends: the Monongahela, the Allegheny and the Ohio.  As I negotiated the Eliza Furnace Trail each morning, I simply enjoyed the warmth, and the structure.  Despite what the rest of the day would bring, for that magical time, I found home away from home.

As I write this, I am once again at 30,000 feet, heading back home to Atlanta.   That's home in every sense of the word.  My wife awaits me there, as well as my friends and my routine.  Tomorrow morning, I'll step across the morning paper, still covered with morning dew, and lose myself somewhere just beyond my driveway.   An hour later, I'll finish right where I started.  Home.  How can it get any better than that?

But even at this high altitude, I feel a little more grounded than I did even two weeks ago.  I'm content in the knowledge that I can pack a little bit of home in my suitcase before I leave again on Sunday afternoon to return to Pittsburgh for another week.  Home will be packed in the form of a pair of running shoes, shorts, Thor-Lo's and singlets.  There is no place like home, wherever you can find it.