One of the unusual things about returning (repeatedly) to the town you grew up in is that one has the ability to retrace all of one's steps, both good and bad.
This cannot be completely done, of course: the fields and woods that I walked in as a youth are now developed suburbs or completely fenced off (and people are odd about unknown folks just ambling across their property, of course). But the outlines are still there and one can drive around them, if not through and in them all the time.
We were fortunate enough to live in the same house my entire life (my room was "my room" until I was 18 and moved away to college, then came back after 1.5 years, then went away again for 3 years, then came back for 1 year; I still sleep in the same bedframe at The Ranch that I did when I was three) and so the boundaries of my neighborhood and range were set - I attended a K-8 school back in the day when "in district" meant you lived in district and so all of my friends were within walking or bike riding distance and at one class per grade level, one's friends stayed the same (more or less) for the whole 9 years.
All of those places I can still drive to now: the street where I used to live (the house I grew up in is now completely hidden by growth), my best friend's house up the hill (his mother still lives there), the effectively large circle that constituted the outer range of my friends and where they lived (and where I could go) extending all the way to the the school we went to. Other than coming to The Ranch (even back then) and my grandparent's house in town, my life was largely measured in a couple of miles.
High School of course expanded my range of course: now I had friends from other schools in town or even out of town. I grew up here a band and drama nerd (no surprise to my readers, perhaps), and so ended up with another close knit group of friends and acquaintances scattered much further afield; thus, even more landscape pervades my memory. Here, too, I can still visit the places that we used to go: The High School (it is still there) where we marched on the football field and performed in the theater; the roads we drove back and forth to each other's house (and in some cases, rather ill-fated and ill-thought out toilet papering attempts); the hotdog-and-fries restaurant that, having achieved a driver's license and ability to go off campus, we would all pile into a friend's VW bug and rush off to (A basket of fresh fries which made a lunch at $1.75); and even their houses (The Actor still lives in the same place that we started our friendship in all those years ago); the railroad tracks that Uisdean Ruadh and I would walk from my house to town and then around town and back home.
Some of the people are still there, but many have moved on. Which perhaps in some ways is for the best: Social media, if it has taught me anything, has taught me that in many cases our lack of continuing contact is probably the best thing for all concerned. And in a way, they have less of a presence and permanence in my memory as such: in many cases it is simply better to remember how people were, not how they have become (true, I am sure, of me as much as anyone else).
Coming back to The Ranch and thus to Old Home is thus for me, almost a visit into a temporal displacement where memories overlay the places I drive to and by, a sort of double-vision laid over a landscape that has both changed significantly and yet, in my memroy, not at all.
Right there with you. I've had that same nostalgia. My stomping grounds are mostly overrun with people now, too. My junior year of high scruel, they need a third person to carry a tuba in band. I joined just for that reason. I was the second best marcher, next to a buddy that was the dumb major. I learned to play the crazy thing and made first chair my senior year. Only because there were 52 kids in my senior class, I'll bet. Medium fish in a small pond.
ReplyDeleteAlmost all the people that meant something to me are gone. Their houses just a reminder of them, like a forgotten place holder in an old book you run across.
The old cotton fields hold a lot of memories. But they are really too quiet. In my day, there were natural gas fueled engines driving the water pumps, not electric motors. There was puddle of sweet exhaust around them, as well as warmth. The place is the same but different....
STxAR - It is funny how a place can be the same and yet so different at the same time.
DeleteI am fortunate in that a number of people that are important to me are still here. It makes the concept of "coming home" a bit more persuasive.
I went back to "the old neighborhood" about ten years ago. There was nothing there. The houses were there, but nothing else. Everything looked older and more run down. Of all the kids I knew on that street, half left the neighborhood. The other half have left the world.
ReplyDeleteNeil Diamond said it well in the song "Brooklyn Roads:" "Thought of goin' back, but all I'd see is strangers' faces, and all the scars that love erases..."
...The old neighborhood is mine no more...
Pete, I think the families that live on the street I grew up on are about the same split (50%); another 10 years, I bet it will be 90% gone.
DeleteBut you are correct - in a very real sense one can never go back.
I pretty much have the opposite problem in my childhood world. Everything is gone and there really hasn't been anything to replace it. Both the elementary and high school I went to have been razed and are just barren fields as well is the first two houses I lived in.
ReplyDeleteI occasionally drive by those things and describe what I can "see" but they cannot but it saddens me because I know that all those memories and feelings die with me. I wish Google Streetview had been a thing back then.
My elementary school is gone. They razed it years ago. My old house across the street is still there. Looks much the same. The house we lived in during high school is a trash pile. Mom and dad were pretty neat when they had it. I, too, have the sadness that my memories will die with me. Some much I remember, and miss. Cross roads, I should have taken, but didn't. Getting obsolete is quite the process...
DeleteEd, I have the exact opposite problem, at least with my schools. Both the K-8 and the high school have expanded and in some cases, it is hard to point to the ways things used to be.
DeleteWhat a thing a Street view would have been from 40 years ago!
This is tangentially related- The places we were bounded by are shrinking over time. As 8-11 year old boys in the 1960's we had about 4 square miles, more or less, of rural roads, farms, swamps and woodlands to play in. Roughly a mile in each cardinal point.
ReplyDeleteI was reading about one woman who returned to her childhood grounds and found all the old trails overgrown- all the kids are inside these days, victims of the two wage household, the internet and ominous warnings on milk cartons.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
Raven, that distance sounds right to me. And yes, the fact that children are outside a great deal more is lamentable - although I guess hard for me to comment, because my children grew up in an actual urban environment, not a semi-urban environment like I did.
DeleteI will agree that two wage households and the InterWeb have intervened - however, it is not nearly the same world you and I grew up in. I walked maybe 1-2 miles to school each way on my own; given the world today (and traffic) there is no way I would feel comfortable with my children doing it. There is real evil in the world today.
Right there with you all. The only good thing about my elementary school not being there is they built a small hospital. The woods we hiked through, and celery fields that provided jobs for students in the summer are all houses now.
ReplyDeleteYou all be safe, God bless and Merry Christmas.
Linda, so much is housing now - and so closely packed together that I can often only barely see the outlines of what I knew.
DeleteLOL.
ReplyDeleteWe did the exact opposite. I was born and grew up in this town. When I was a kid, it was Mayberry. Now it's a small city with traffic, crime, noise and all the baggage that goes along with it. The old neighborhoods I lived and played in are now falling into diversity and decay. Everything's changed. I have changed. The family is atomized, and I am no longer the young man that drove his roots down here. But... the bills are all paid, we have a little money saved up, and to haul up stakes and go would not be a good financial step. But I get so restless sometimes. I wonder if some distance between us and the doings here might not have been for the better...?
You can never go home TB, even if you stay there.
It is hard Glen - I think often times whether towns thrive or not is the luck of the draw. Three towns with a close distance of my hometown have not had nearly the success my hometown did, for reasons I cannot understand, while two others did. Even my town is changed and not immune: they have managed to revive their downtown, but some of the other issues of larger cities - like homelessness -have boomed.
DeleteIt is hard - even here in New Home, we have done well and have a house and we are close to everything. Yes, this does not seem like "home" in the sense that I know, but does that inherently make a place where one could not be happy? That, I do not know.
Funny, I'm writing the inverse of this tomorrow . . .
ReplyDeleteJohn - The timing is fortuitous. Having read your article (but needing to comment on it still), I will say that your observation of the overall sense of "fear" is exactly correct.
DeleteMy mom still lives in the house we all grew up in. Going home for Christmas, perhaps her last, or at least the last in her home. It is no longer home for me. I've spent more time the last 2 years in my old home town than in the last 30 because of mother's declining health. The streets and houses are the same, but the people are all gone. I drive by the homes of my boyhood companions, and the friends are all gone, the houses now occupied by the New Americans that we've seen streaming here since Reagan signed Amnesty. All of those former families have fled to exurbs or further, a general retreat, like Napoleon from Moscow. Ten years ago, my niece graduated from the same school as the rest of my family, there was only one other name I recognized from my time there, the family that owned the Texaco service station had stuck it out, and their daughter was walking the stage where we walked. So many have pulled up stakes and moved on. In the big picture, it was just a highway with schools attached to it. Nevertheless, I remember the times fondly, and wish we could see the ghosts of long ago parade across the landscape. In reality, my old home town has simply become a memorial park for reverie.
ReplyDeleteJust So - Last year was our last Christmas at home, so I can understand the feeling. That seems to add an additional layer of poignancy.
DeleteI am sure the day will come - probably in my lifetime - where I will no longer recognize the town I grew up in either. To be fair, I suppose if I dug a little deeper I would find it - after all, one week a month is not really time to dig in.
Man, what would our lives have been like if we had what we had today with the same environment of 40 years ago and not of today?