Chris Duffy

So instead, I will say stay warm and we'll catch you next year.

Thanks for listening.

I'm going to go blow my nose.

What is home?

Lately, I've been thinking about that question a lot.

Because home isn't just a place with familiar spots and corners.

It's where you feel a sense of belonging.

And as the world has gotten bigger and messier and lonelier, I have been feeling like it is more urgent than ever to have people and places that I can depend on.

To really call a place home.

When I brought this up to my friend, the poet and educator Sarah Kay, she said,

So today we are hanging out with Hanif Abdurraqib and learning about why he loves his hometown so much.

Hanif Abdurraqib wears many hats, but I know him first as a poet and a writer, a cultural critic who writes about music in a way that makes you just want to listen to albums all day long.

An essayist whose books about grief and joy and basketball make you ugly cry in public.

Every time I think I'm going to dodge it and then he gets me again, I am tearing up.

Hanif spends a lot of time on the road, but he always returns to the place where he is from, the east side of Columbus, Ohio.

And that is not just a place that Hanif loves.

It is clearly a place that loves Hanif right back.

So I sat down with Hanif in one of his favorite spots in town, a vinyl record shop called Spoonful Records, to find out why.

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of when the world is really overwhelming and there's so much going on, how one of the ways that we can ground ourselves is to be in a specific place, to be in a community and with people we care about, taking care of them and having them take care of us.

The idea of offering yourself up to people freely and eagerly, that really stuck with me.