The Other Childhood Home

Bennington, Vt., July 2025

My friend Rob Siegel is an engaging, incisive singer-songwriter who writes hilarious stuff but also very cogent, unflinchingly honest songs about families, friendship, rites of passage and other phenomena that are part of the condition of being human. The title track of his new album, "I'm From Here," is a meditation on how we tend to define ourselves by birthplace and/or other childhood homes. As Rob notes in his foreword, the song is based on the idea "that where you’re born, where you’re from, and where you call home aren’t the same thing."

For Rob, who grew up on Long Island and in Amherst, Mass., the big revelation came when his mother died, his father having passed in Rob's childhood:

I was wrong

I should’ve known

we don’t come from soil

we come from love and bone

He concludes:

I'm not from Bethpage, Long Island

I'm from my parents' dreams

It's a powerful sentiment, and I can certainly agree: Who am I, after all, if not the child of my parents, and the result of their love and hope?

That said, I've thought a lot in recent years – during which time my mother died (as with Rob, my father also passed away far too soon, but at least I was a father myself by then) and I sold the house she and I had lived in – about places I've lived and the impact they've had on me.

A little clarification is in order: My parents divorced when I was very young, and my mother had primary custody of me. But I visited my father frequently: one or two weekends a month during the school year, for part of Christmas/New Year's, and longer stints in summer. Still, "home" was where Mom and I lived – I certainly defined it as home, since that was where I attended school, and that was where most of my clothes, playthings and other possessions (like my comic books) were.

The simplest answer I can give to the question "Where are you from?" is to say that I spent most of my childhood in the Hudson Valley of New York. But by the time Mom and I moved there, I'd already lived in three other places: Englewood, NJ (for the first six months or so of my life), Cambridge, Mass., and Astoria, NY.

However, by then I'd also spent significant time in Bennington, Vt., where my father and his second wife lived. Bennington had become my "other" childhood home, and would remain so until I was in high school, when my father and stepmother split up.

But this was no ordinary home: My stepmom taught at Bennington College and so our family lived on campus in faculty housing. For a kid, it was like having an extra-enormous yard to play around in and explore, and since there was little in the way of traffic to worry about, you could just head out the door and be gone for, well, hours (yeah, it really was a different time then).

I had Bennington friends. Matt and I role-played World War II GI Joes and tossed the football around (poorly). We each had a word that tripped us up: He pronounced "hamburger" as "hang-a-burger"; I turned "monument" into "mommy-mint" (our back porch looked out onto the Bennington Monument a few miles away, so it often came up in conversation).

There also was a charming French couple next door who had a daughter, Ann, a couple of years younger than me. We were quite fond of one another, although for a very brief time we had an unusual ritual: I would kneel down so that I was about at her height, she would extend her right hand off to the side, and with a dramatic flourish (and relish) smack me across the face. It didn't hurt, since she was a small girl and didn't put much strength into her slap. Her parents were mortified when they witnessed this, however, so they made us stop.

I passed some significant childhood milestones during my times at Bennington. I learned to swim at Lake Paran in North Bennington. I learned to ski at Mount Prospect, about 12 miles to the east. I took horseback riding lessons one summer, although I didn't progress any farther than beginner-level.

And when I was 11 or 12, I started going to the college's library and browsed through the bound editions of The New York Times, which went back a good two or three decades. I also learned how to operate the microfilm reader to view even earlier editions of the Times -- back as far as the 1860s. I'll admit that some of my explorations were to look up sports events, like the 1958 Colts-Giants NFL championship game. But I also was curious to see how the Times covered, for example, the JFK assassination, the end of World War II, the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland, and other major historical occurrences.

For kids like me, such events were the stuff of scholastic textbooks, classroom discussions, homework papers, and sometimes reminiscences from older relatives. But ordinary people had read these "first rough drafts of history"* at their breakfast table, or in their living room, or en route to or from work, and in retrospect, I think this fascinated me. You read about it, maybe you tried to make sense of it, talk about it with a friend or neighbor or family member -- maybe even a complete stranger on the bus or train -- and perhaps put it in some kind of perspective, but more likely, you just moved along to whatever part of your daily life was next. And then the next day would bring another newspaper. I can't help but think this experience planted a seed for my subsequent interest, and eventual career, in journalism. [*There's a longstanding debate on the origin of that phrase, but it seems to have been coined by Alan Barth in a 1943 New Republic book review.]

Meanwhile, history was going on around me, as it does for us all. About the same time I started haunting the college library, Bennington went co-educational, so now there were young men on the campus. And the student population seemed a lot more visible and conspicuous than I'd remembered -- or, because I was now somewhat closer in age to them, maybe I just paid more attention to what they were doing. Rock music boomed from stereo speakers placed strategically in residence hall windows, or from live concerts and jam sessions around campus. Frisbee, soccer and other games took place on the immensely long Commons Green, and sometimes the students weren't above letting a faculty brat join in. There were fun, even silly events, like Halloween parades or spring festivals, and I learned what "good vibes" were.

It's not a stretch to think that these experiences at Bennington, and at the colleges where my father and mother taught when I was in my pre/early teens, had at least some part years later in steering me to work in higher education -- which is where I've been for more than three-and-a-half decades, so I guess it's panned out.

Back in July, I decided I needed a short getaway to cap my summer. And I thought, why not Bennington? I hadn't been there in decades. I booked a stay in a motel at the edge of town, and spent a warm, sunny afternoon at the college. The campus wasn't deserted: There was a program for international students taking place, and some assorted grad students were walking around as well. But that was fine. I think it would have been a little too eerie, and disappointing, if the place was completely empty.

Some things had definitely changed. There were more buildings than when I was there, and I discovered that the residences where my family lived had all been converted to student housing. And some parts of the campus seemed smaller than I remembered, like the meadow and grove of trees where Matt and I would engage in our struggle against the Nazis. But I'm bigger than I was then, so that might explain it. Of course I went into the library. Not surprisingly, the bound editions of the Times and the microfilm collections are all long gone.

The Commons Green, to my delight, still goes on forever.

I am quite aware of how extremely fortunate I was to have lived part of my life here. In the past, when I've gone through the litany of childhood homes, I would add -- almost as an afterthought -- that I also "spent a lot of time" in Bennington. The visit made me realize that Bennington more than qualifies for the list. How could it not?

So, above all, I am from Nancy and Tom, whose love for one another managed to endure even if their marriage didn't.

And if anyone asks, I'm from Englewood, NJ, and Cambridge, Mass., and Astoria, NY, and the Hudson Valley. And I'm also from Bennington, Vt.

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