Two of the most splendid and special words in the English language are “Going home.” Baseball players aspire to it as their goal every time they are at bat. College students long for it, even if it just means getting their laundry done. Thomas Wolfe wrote that we cannot go home again and countless musicians and singers have lamented their inability to ever return to their roots. Going home seems to be wired into our DNA and the intense desire to relive the lost and fleeting days of our youth is an obsession for many, if you can believe the thousands of posts on social media.
I recently felt that same twinge and longing to return home when I visited my sister and brother-in-law, who live not very far from the house I grew up in. Every time I return to my hometown, I feel a mild tugging of my heart-strings as I drive past those familiar locations I recall from my youth. I grew up in Kenmore, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, during the 1950’s and 60’s. I went to college there, met my wife there, buried my parents there, and, in the late 1970’s left there to pursue my career. I have now been away from Kenmore longer than I lived there and on my last trip home, it seemed even farther away than it has ever been before.
A large part of that feeling, I am sure, is because almost all of my old familiar places have either been replaced, or are simply gone. The corner store, where I was first employed, is now some sort of quasi- office building. My family house, where I used to play and frolic, has been painted and re-done, to almost resemble a house pretty similar to what Hansel and Gretel experienced; and not one of the stores I shopped in so often, on our main street, is still open and operating. Nothing was as I remembered it and even most of our beautiful landmark trees had been removed or replaced. I was starting to firmly believe what Thomas Wolfe had written.
Oh, here and there, of course, some landmarks had not changed. I could still visit the greatest ice cream store in the world, and I did, as many times as I could with only a weekend to enjoy its menu. My favorite chicken wing restaurant was right where it always had been, but it also now opened three additional sites, including one in Texas. That should be a real “eye-opener” for the fine citizens of the Lone Star state. The streets were still under construction, as they always seem to be, the college where my wife and met our freshman year, is still open and graduating students on a regular basis and my high school, although larger in geographic footprint, had a graduating class exactly half of what my class had, back in the wild baby-boomer years. Everything was still there, just not in the same place, with the same people, and in some cases, without the same charm that I recalled so fondly. It seems that what really had changed was me.
And that, I now understand, is the way it should be. We all grow, grow up and often, move on. I left Kenmore on a bright and sunny summer day to begin a career that has taken me to places I never could have imagined in that house that now looks like a ginger bread home. My wife and I have raised a terrific family and next year will celebrate 40 years of happy marriage. We have traveled, worked, laughed and cried and have way too frequently, returned home for the funerals of our loved ones. Our trips back home to Buffalo have grown less frequent over the years, but we have grown to treasure them all the more with each passing visit. We now have only a few friends and relatives remaining who have not already moved or passed on. I wonder how frequently we will return when they are all gone.
I suspect that the trips will end at that point and western New York will simply be a memory for us when that day finally arrives. Our retirement plans involve one more move, and it will be far away from the shores of lake Erie and the,” Niagara Frontier.” We crave the heat, do not want to experience snow and cold anymore, as my friend and musician, Jim Allison wrote. We will trade “snow and sleet for sand and sea shells” and when the trip back home involves a long airplane ride, rather than a half day’s car ride, I suspect that the trip back home will fade into the sunset; like a lone gull swooping effortlessly above “The Falls.”
As I have aged, I have come to understand Thomas Wolfe even more. I no longer believe that you can always go home. I believe you can certainly make the trip, you can physically return to the streets of your youth, but you cannot really go home. You cannot recreate the feeling you had when you walked the streets in wonder, raced to be home before the streetlights came on, or dashed to the corner store to buy baseball cards and popsicles. But you don’t have to. What I have slowly come to understand is that you cannot go home, because you have really never left. Home is always right there in your heart, it is always in your mind, and more importantly, it is always imbedded in your memory. It is strange is that as you age, you seem to remember the distant past much more clearly than more recent events. And that, it seems to me, is a true gift. I can vividly remember pickup baseball games at “the field.” I will never forget the delightful smells of donuts baking in my father’s donut shop. I will never forget the thrill of the first football game of our high school team. Those memories are as real today as they were back in the 1960’s.
No, you really cannot go home, because you have never really left. Home is always there, just a thought away. All the days of our youth are stored right between our ears and we can always go home anytime we want. Going home, still two of the most beautiful words you can ever hear…..