Can You Go Home Again?

NMB, Florida January 13, 2002 A.H. Schectman

THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on Issues, Ideas and Reflections on the Times. Published Now and
Then. Opinions Pro or Con Are Welcome.

CAN YOU GO HOME AGAIN?

Can you go home again? I think not. I think it is like stepping in the same
stream twice - the same water - after a time when that water has flowed
away. One may want to repeat it but time has a way of altering place. My
son made a face filled with a sense of loss when I told him I had redone his
old room. This was after he had a home of his own and a family. I had
removed the built-in furniture that I had cobbled together from pieces found
in the Salvation Army. I felt the same way about that room. It was still
his old room, but at the same time it was no more and could never be again.

My memories include indelible blue prints of wondrous places where I have
been. I clearly see the hamper or box, the bottom of which was filled with
a treasure trove of toys. I had found it somehow while rummaging, as a young
boy will do, through exotic and forbidden places. That place struck a chord
in me that still impels me to search for some part of that early home place.
Under that pile of clothing I discovered my wealth, my power, my ownership
of things of great import to a very small-undeveloped child. Did my parents
set up that wondrous event for me? I do not know and wonder about it to
this day. It was a very private discovery.

Does one still think in terms of ritual or habit long after the place where
it was practiced is gone? I know so. Like the phantom itch in a limb no
longer attached, it is there. Our minds see it and feel it. I would like
it to be otherwise or better, otherwhen. But time does that to us. I have
tried to incorporate my response to those past times into today's rituals.
Regretfully I will never again find the tools (I know exactly where I last
saw them) I need now. I had them and valued them and know where they are in
some when. The drawer filled with the detritus of untold bending down and
retrieving screws, bolts or metal parts that might have use some time in the
future is still there in my mind along with the times I learned they would
have a use sometime.

That may be why we collect these once useful things from the past in the
now to hoard against some future need urged by some past nudge.

I would be out of place in my memorialized house when very young now that I
am old. However, I still see myself perched on a pile of newspapers on an
old steam radiator shrilling its sound through a snug inside room. In that
cold winter day I sit toasting on top of the papers to scratch the frost off
the window with still unbitten fingernails. My view through a patch of
clear glass is of a street that probably no longer exists. Carol's
Evaluation. Carol didn't understand this one.