You Can't Go Home Again

This is a draft of a speech I am giving tomorrow. I have left out specific names and incidents that could identify individuals.

You Can’t Go Home Again - - Or Can You? ©
Early this month I attended a high school reunion in a little town in Northeastern Colorado. Eighty miles northeast of Denver. There are no mountains, not even any scenery to speak of. It’s high plains country, with an elevation of 4500 ft. There’s irrigated farming and feed lots to fatten cattle for market.

The high school is gone; the grade school is boarded up. The Presbyterian Church is sandblasted and the stained glass windows gleam. It looks better than ever, and somehow smaller than I remember. The town had made an addition to the wonderful Carnegie Library, a place where I must have read half the books. The old library is now a meeting area. Perfectly preserved.

The swimming pool still offers respite from the high altitude heat, but McLagen’s Dairy is gone. The race track that has seen many a rodeo, quarter horse race and Friday night football game still stands. The cafe has bad food, just like always. The lemon pie had a topping of marshmallow cream, not meringue. My friend S. lives in the house she was born in. Another friend just participated in selling her parent’s house, a place that was home to the family for 81 years. The people who live there now and have always lived there wouldn’t have mixed feelings if you asked them about going home. They know where home is. They never left.

Home! What a loaded word! So many connotations. So much baggage.
Where is home? What is home? It means something different to each of us.

Is it where I was born?
Where I grew up?
Where I came of age?
Where my children were born?
Where I hang my hat at night?

We hear the cliché’s all the time:

Home is where the heart is. (attributed to Pliny) over 2000 years ago.
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. (from the song Home Sweet Home.
East and west, home is best. The old folks at home.
Robert Frost said: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Robert Frost didn’t deal in clichés.

Home. . I carry the concept of home around like a turtle has her shell. Home is always with me.


And yet. We hear it repeatedly. You Can’t Go Home Again. What does that mean?

Of course it means you can’t recover the past. You Can’t Go Home Again is the title of a novel by the twentieth-century American author Thomas Wolfe. When a successful novelist is ostracized by the family and friends of his hometown, he embarks on a worldwide search for his own identity and personal renewal. (Wikipedia)
Your can’t go home again. You can’t recapture the past.

Anton Dvorak's most famous passage in his New World Symphony, the Largo, is known, after the fact, as “Going Home.” He wrote the music far from home in n New York City. He was trying to capture the feeling of some of the American music he had heard. Some would say he was homesick.

I can write about my town without resorting to research. Like the small Kansas town my grandparent’s lived in, it’s always in my head--a part of me. But I recognize how dramatically it’s changed. Colorado has changed, and I’ve changed. Your homes, whether few or many become a part of you.

Tennyson’s Ulysses stated, “I am a part of all that I have met.” How true those words. I lived in Colorado from the age of six to eighteen. The formative years... When I go back to Colorado for these reunions, I go home again and yet. . . I can’t.

Still, I am so glad that I went back for the reunion. At different ages, you look at life with new eyes.

Why Should We Try To Go Home Again?

Reconnect with friends: when we get together everyone regresses to the age of sixteen. You have a deep bond with the people you grew up. Nourish it. Everyone has traveled, had adventures Swap stories, pictures, eat, drink, laugh, cry. Reconnect with friends.

Reconnect with places. Downtown used to bustle on Saturdays when the farmers came to town. Now, it’s deserted. Where were the people? At Walmart.
Thirty-five coal trains from Gillette, Wyoming travel through the middle of town every day, bound for Denver and points west and south. That’s a lot of crossing gates down. Lots of waiting. Time to think.
There are many Mexican restaurants – Hispanics, a group that used to be down is up. The town has a big Cinco de Mayo celebration and there is Latino pride. Some changes are for the better, and not just a decent enchilada.
Visit your old haunts, look around. Do buildings look smaller? Have distances shrunk? Does everything look the same but different? That’s how you are, too. Except you probably haven’t shrunk. Reconnect with landscapes.

Reconnect with yourself – the person you were and the person you are. The older you are, the more amazed you will be. I never realized this was a poor community until I went back. An outsider noted, “There are a lot of very small houses in this town.” As a child, you accept the status quo. I remembered something I loved about every house I lived in, even if it was only a good climbing tree. Especially if it was a good climbing tree. Everything has changed, and so have you. Reconnect.

Reconnect with Life - - Leave your copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul at home. You won't need it here .Some classmates have thrived against overwhelming odds; others have been beaten down by life and not recovered. Not all the stories you hear will be happy ones. Examples.

You can go home again, but don’t expect it to be the same. Pack an open mind with your toothbrush. Be prepared for the flood of old memories, some good, and some bad.

Our class motto was: With the Ropes of the Past, We Ring the Bells of the Future. Corny then, corny now, but as with all corn, there’s the kernel of truth.
Perhaps a visit “home” will inspire you to pursue some of those old impossible dreams and a your long ago discarded goals. Proust remembered the past through many volumes of his novel. You can capture the past, cherish the memories, release the fears, dispel the awkwardness. Reconnect with friends, landscapes, yourself, life.
Go home again. ©

Grapeshot