You Can't Go Home Again

                                      “You Can’t Go Home Again”

         You hear the words often enough, “You can’t go home again.” Novelist Thomas Wolfe is most often credited with the phrase. Most of us never stop to think what it really means. “Of course you can,” we say to our selves. But, if you ever do try to visit your childhood home or neighborhood, after many years of being away, there really is an aura of someplace different than what you remembered.

     Were the rooms really this small? Or was I just a smaller person then and the rooms seemed bigger? And was the neighborhood always this run down? I mean the grass isn’t even cut on some of the neighboring lawns. There is a screen door hanging askew two doors down and a porch that is sagging precipitously just across the street. Were they always this way? I don’t remember them as anything but trim and tidy.

     Of course the disc antennas, attached to the roof exteriors, are exotic looking. They are drawn as if from a space age movie. When we were younger there were huge cross shaped antennas sprouting from the rows of houses, each trying to catch signals from the three or four stations that were then transmitting the new invention of television into our airwaves. I always wondered about that. It still seems like a scientific miracle of sorts that those shows found their way into our homes straight from thin air. And then came color television? Wow! It was like a scene from the wizard of Oz watching those vibrant colors flash across the screen.

     And the different languages that pepper the streets are a lesson in world geography. Where did all the neighbors move? I wonder if they come back and see the differences like I do.

      There are probably still a few faces here that have watched the flowing river of time carry the different waves of people in and out of the neighborhood. Those who stayed saw the changes in slow motion, so the gradation of differences is not so apparent to them.

     And I wonder if I would get on with those whom I haven’t seen in so many years? We are all very different people than we were so many years ago. Would we have any thing to converse about or just ask “How about them Buffalo Bills, huh?” That question would bring a groan now as it had so many years ago.

      The youngsters that I knew so well then are grandparents now. That seems odd to me. Can two whole generations have arrived and grown up since last I had walked these streets? I wonder what paths all of their lives have taken? The newer employment opportunities have scattered them across the globe like seeds sown upon the drifting wind. Do they ever return here and wonder like I do?

        I think about this for a bit and decide, that “yes, you can go home, but it isn’t really there anymore.” Like a stage set for a theatrical production, the company has moved onto another venue. The new drama currently being enacted here has a whole different cast with conflicts and resolutions that I never even thought about so many years ago.

        Perhaps it is best, that I remember the concept of home as the bucolic and endearing place that my memory paints so vividly for me. I can return there anytime I wish and remember the warm and happy place that it was for me so long ago and far away.

                                               -30-

                                 Joseph Xavier Martin