Thomas Wolfe, the author, wrote a book entitled “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Johnny Cash told us in song that “The old home town looks the same.” Cash, however, admits later in the song that he “was only dreaming.” Wolfe got it right. You can go to the “place” - but you will find that “home” is no longer there. Like an anaconda eating its prey, it was swallowed whole by that omnivorous glutton we call “time.”
Yesterday, May26, 2012, I returned to “my old home town” to attend the high school‘s annual “Alumni Dinner and Reunion.” Oh, I had attended others in previous years but somehow this year was different. I arrived at mid-day because I wanted to have time to feel at home again before attending that dinner with those whom I knew would be "kids" who, like me, were masquerading as old people: so-called “Senior Citizens.” I parked my car and began exploring. While walking down our little “Main Street,” all of four blocks long, ghosts kept popping up, replacing the reality of what was in front of my eyes. I looked into the door of the drug store. It was closed for the holiday weekend, and while my eyes were saying what I was seeing was a couple of counters with patent medicines and sundries on them and a pharmacists nook in the back, my mind saw a soda fountain with half a dozen high school kids sitting on stools drinking soft drinks and flirting with the high school soda jerk. Over in the corner, where my eyes said someone had placed a carousel loaded with greeting cards, my mind rejected that view. My mind saw a magazine rack with two or three teen aged boys standing around it leafing through the magazines looking for pin-up girls to drool over and cartoons to laugh at and share. I walked away leaving those ghosts to enjoy their weekend in the closed store, and went on down the street towards the corner where I had spent four years as a high school boy. I knew it wasn’t there anymore. It hadn’t been there for years. But yesterday, maybe it is my age and the realization that so much more of my earthly life is behind rather than in front of me, instead of that silly metal-sided grocery store being there my mind saw an old “C-shaped” two-story-and-a-basement brick building with young kids looking out some of the windows. The dumpy looking grocery store itself was long-closed for lack of business so the ghosts had that site all to themselves. I smiled at them and left them where they belonged - in my memory.
I’d had enough of “main street” and the ghosts who escaped from my memory to inhabit it temporarily. I got into my car and began searching for other places where “home” should still exist. Out the road toward “Four Corners” I went: Toward that old bridge my friends and I stood on to shoot at snakes and turtles in the muddy “Caney River” running below. Ah, a bridge. That’s tangible. My eyes and my mind will agree on what I see tthere. When I got there my eyes spoke up first: “You’re seeing a concrete-sided bridge, Don.” My mind said “No.” It destroyed that bridge and replaced it with an old-fashioned bridge shouldering heavy loads with sturdy iron trusses held together with rivets. But that ghostly bridge faded from view as I stood there on its surface. I turned my car around to look elsewhere for familiarity – for “home.”
Everywhere I looked I found “lies.” This wasn’t my hometown. This wasn’t the “Caney River Dam” where we caught crawdads beneath the rocks. Where was the “Shale Pit” that we climbed pretending we were mountaineers? Trees were now hiding it. That hill outside of town that no longer has a tall, black “Standpipe” with illicit writing on it can’t be called “Standpipe Hill” without a standpipe on it.
Before I knew it, it was time to go to the grade school gymnasium for the buffet dinner. And that’s where I surrendered. I heard people who were supposed to be grade school kids talking about their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I heard them pseudo-bemoaning the various aches and pains they lived with. It sunk in. That was reality.
I drove back home after the dinner. It was a 3 hour drive. All the way home the ghosts I’d seen kept competing with the people I had hugged, shook hands and chatted with only an hour or so ago. Along about halfway to what I now call home my eyes and my mind finally reached a compromise. “Home” is that delightful place I built with materials provided to me by a young man who grew up in a particular town in Southeast Kansas, who now lived inside me. You see, Mr. Wolfe, you don’t need to GO home. You ARE home so long as memory lives and you are willing to embrace it.