"I'm so glad to be at home again!"

Home Again

Aunt Em had just come out of the house to water the cabbages when she looked up and saw Dorothy running toward her.
“My darling child!” she cried, folding the little girl in her arms and covering her face with kisses; “where in the world did you come from?”
“From the land of Oz”, said Dorothy gravely.  “And here is Toto, too. And oh, Aunt Em!  I’m so glad to be at home again!”

The End

That is the final chapter of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.  I believe, dear friends, this is one of the most beautiful endings to a story that I have ever read. It doesn’t really end with any kind of fanfare or big dramatic cliff hanger. It ends so simply: Aunt Em is stoically carrying on with her farm duties (Remember, in the book, Dorothy was gone for days and days and days.) when she finds her little orphan girl in the middle of the yard. That’s it. No big “to-do” about where she had gone or no big questions; just relief and love.

I have thought so much about “Oz” over the years and my understanding of the story has evolved as I have aged.  When I was much younger, I was transfixed with the adventure, the quest, of Dorothy and her three companions.  In my young adulthood, I could really associate with the Cowardly Lion. I felt, and still do to a certain extent, his fear of everything and everyone. But now, in my mid-thirties, as I read the script and re-read the story, I find myself struck with such an overwhelming sense of longing that I never knew was there before.  A surprisingly deep, and resonating melancholy and bittersweet longing rings in my soul as I read the story again.

Dorothy is longing to get back home. The Scarecrow is longing for brains.  The Tin Woodman is longing for a heart. The Cowardly Lion is longing for courage.  The Wizard is longing for secrecy. The Wicked Witch is longing for the magic shoes. The one longing … the one solitary longing … that rings clear in my heart is Dorothy’s longing to be home again.  Put yourself in this little girl’s place for a moment:

She is, by all modern accounts, a victim of a natural disaster. Correct? She has been uprooted from her tiny, one room shack of a farmhouse and dropped into another world.  (Think of it as being blown away by the Tuscaloosa tornado and brought down in San Francisco.)  From the time she sets out on the yellow brick road, she has one objective: to get the hell home.  But things are never as easy as we want them to be.  She has to walk for days to see some wizard who MIGHT be able to send her home. Along the way, she picks up three complete nut jobs and encounters obstacles that would test the physical and psychological limits of a grown man - not to mention an eleven year old girl.  Then, after being granted an audience with a giant disembodied head, she and her friends are told to go kill someone and THEN the boss will send her home.  You know the rest, of course.  (What the hell is so great about this story again??)  I cannot begin to imagine the level of terror this little girl felt on a daily basis.  Why, then, did she keep on easing down the road with a stupid man, a heartless guy with rusty parts and a big gay cat??  There is only one word powerful enough to make any of us go through what Dorothy had gone through: Home. 

The “home” I’m talking about here is not the home we have now as adults.  I am talking about your first home…the one with your own room across the hall from mom and dad’s bedroom. Your childhood home where it seemed nothing bad could ever reach you and, if it did, you had a great hiding spot. Maybe it was that spot between the foot of your bed and your big stand-alone record player stereo…the place where the shag carpet is worn flat from the hours you spend sitting there listening to the original cast vinyl recording of Annie .

Remember your very first night in your first apartment when every strange sound was as loud as a train whistle?  Or the first time your parents went out for the evening and left you, alone and confused, in a strange house with a babysitter and you thought they would NEVER come back for you?  How about when you’ve had a horrible day, when nothing has gone the way it should, and all you want to do is go home and sit in your dad’s lap and watch a PBS Nova program or sit on your mom’s lap while she files her nails and softly hums your favorite song while you run your little hand over the silky material of her nightgown?  That’s home.  That is the place Dorothy wanted to be more than anywhere else in the world.  What else would drive her to do the things she did?  If you were told the only way you could have these things back is to go and perform such dangerous acts of bravery, wouldn’t you do it?  I would.  The aching longing for that sense of home would drive me to do things I never thought possible. 

And here we all thought The Wizard of Oz was kid’s story with a handful of fun characters and a lighthearted sense of fun and adventure.  Take a moment and look deeper.  Oz is complicated and dangerous and beautiful and terrifying and magical…all the things we want in a good book, right?  Or is it all the things we want in life?