(Note: Possibly AI generated.)\
One of the unusual advantages afforded me by going to Old Home so often over the past 5.5 years that I regularly drive through my old home town and, upon occasion, go up my old street.
I grew up in the same house for my entire life. The street - a small one with maybe twenty houses back then with a dead end - was a sort of community. For years - probably until early high school - owners did not change very often and thus we knew everyone that lived there. Some of my grade school and high school classmates lived on the street. Even today, there are a few families there from that period of time.
When I was in what is now the equivalent of middle school (6th - 8th grade), one of my best friends moved up just up the hill from my house. To get to his house, I could have walked all the way down the street and around and up the hill with their drive way - or, I could (and did) walk up the gravel road next to our house, cut through the property next door, go under two fences, and just arrive. It was the same with my other school friends who were farther away but within walking distance - in fact, walking the fields and forests that were between myself and them was far safer than trying to walk the roads that led to their houses.
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I could take you back there now. The street is still there, although it no longer dead-ends but runs into the previous pasture next to it which itself has become built over with houses. At least two of our original neighbors live there; the rest of the homes have turned over in the intervening years, including the one I grew up in - which is now worth 7.5 times the amount my parents paid for it.
The pastures and woods and paths I walked are now more built up or fenced off. I could, if I wanted to, get to the back woods where most of my 7th and 8th grade years were spent running through trees and building forts - but somehow a man in his 50's on private property is a little more of a concern than a boy of 12.
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That sort of nostalgia clouds my entire view of that time of course. It is fair to say that life was "simpler" back then - but then again, I was a child and then a teenager in a middle class household where we went to church every Sunday and had breakfast and dinner together almost every night. Part of my extended family were near. The great "issues" I faced in life seem almost ridiculous by today's standards, a combination of unrequited love and role playing games and music and drama and the sorts of things that seem so far away both from my life now - but also from the lives of my children when they were that age.
The world, in the intervening years, became far more complex and complicated.
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Am I homesick for a time and place I can never return to?
In one sense, no. Heraclitus' admonition that we can never step into the same river twice remains as true as it ever was. Even when I go back to visit now, it is not the same. Even if I relocated there, the people are gone, the world has become much older and sadder, and I am have grown older as well, with the wear and cares and scars that life as an adult brings.
And yet, in another sense, yes.
As much as it is impossible to recreate, there is a part of me that wants that simpler life - not from the sense of re-creating it (that can never happen) as much from a sense of enjoying the same feeling from it. There was a certain sense of place and being surrounded by those that I did life with, my school friends and family that has been extracted over years of moving to a series of destinations that were home, but only for a while (as it turns out) and a series of people that I associated with (and they with me) that was driven as much by proximity as by mutual interests.
That - that sense of place and people and, in a real sense, purpose - seems lost in a way that it is unlikely to return.
1 Corinthians 13: 11
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
Not only was the massive tree fort we built so tiny and decrepit but our paths we explored all day were so short.
That nice lady that gave us cookies and tea is dead.
That horrible little girl is nowhere to be seen (cooties, ewww) Hat Tip to Calvin here.
Once we raced frantically looking for that stuffed animal we misplaced. HT Calvin.
Today we quietly stress over morning coffee about the bank account and bills coming due.
We grew up. Life changed.
But we still have the memories for good or for ill, our choice.
Michael - Perhaps it is partially the rose colouring of childhood. And as our worlds expand, so do our concerns and responsibilities and our attentions.
DeleteBut I do wonder if it is something more as well.
At least colloquially, Generation "Z" (Born 1997 to 2012) is finding interest not the things of this generation or even of their own "generation" growing up, but rather of things that were made before their time in the 1980's and 1990's. Again, all colloquial (although vinyl really did make a comeback), but I wonder if it also hearkens back to an unknown, unspoken idea that "now" has very little to offer except whatever is the modern current thing.
That longing for what WAS......especially when you were a child is powerful, my growing up was much like yours TB, a sense of security provided by the parents and neighbors. Unlike today when porch pirates and catalytic converter thieves are prevalent with the retreat of law enforcement. Thomas Wolfe had an effort from the last century...."You Can't Go Home Again". Times change TB, even day to day.
ReplyDeleteNylon12 - A sense of security is a good way to describe it. I knew the world around me, knew the people around me, to some extent knew my place in it. Now we very much seem like isolated sticks in a stream, bumping into each other as we flow to the sea, occasionally coming together in an eddy before being swept apart again.
DeleteIs the world more complex or do we just mentally make it more complex? My father and I were having this discussion just last week. I remember my parents taking us to town where they had some sort of meeting or event that didn't involve us so they just dropped us off at the park down the street, along with other children of other parents, and we roamed around well into the night until their event was done. I would never do the same with my kids because I would worry about abductions, the liabilities of them falling and getting hurt, etc. It seems more complicated but I'm sure those possibilities existed even back during my childhood. It is just my parents didn't think about them because there weren't as prevalent to us through forms of news, internet or social media. We've just made things complicated for ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI think maybe both, Ed? The world is arguably more complex (at least in terms of technology and social media) than when you and I grew up. And I had the same experiences as you: when growing up we were to some extent "free range", something we never did with our children as well. I guess in our defense, I grew up in a small town where my parents knew the names of every parent of every friend I had. We live in a culture that often seems much more transient now; as we progressed through our living journey I have come to know less and less of my neighbors until now with apartment living, I do not know them at all. Part of that is strictly functional: we keep separate schedules and a typical concrete apartment layout does not encourage visiting. But it goes deeper than that: our relationships tend to be with those we spend time with, not those that we see, given the increasingly nomadic age we live in.
DeletePart of that likely sounds like an old man grumbling of course. That said, if I had to put it into a word, I would use "community". Something which we scarcely seem to have at all anymore.
I remember a long time ago thinking, the one constant thing in life is change. Or maybe I read it somewhere. Things change. Woody
ReplyDeleteWoody, it is a perennial sort of saying that shows up in all times and in all cultures.
DeleteOne thing that has stuck with me though is the speed of that change. Long ago I read a passage that said a European could have been born in 1700 and lived to 1800 and would not have seen a great deal of change, at least technologically speaking. The same European, born in 1800 and living in 1900, would have seen incredible technological (and political) change.
For some reason, I'm neither a nostalgic nor sentimental person. But most of my life I've felt that I don't belong "here," and that I was born to the wrong time or the wrong planet.
ReplyDeleteInteresting Leigh. I, too, have the sense of being born in the wrong time (possibly the wrong planet as well, although I suspect my lifespan on Barsoom with John Carter would have been a short one as I am a pretty bad swordsman).
DeleteI am terribly nostalgic and sentimental - in some ways, it seems to develop more as the years go by and "the world" slips away and I find myself, truly, in a Strange Land.