The Long Way Home

Christmas was very cold this year in my hometown. I had forgotten how quickly the wind could whip up off the lake and fill you with regret that you hadn’t worn a hat. Luckily for me I was only in town for Christmas Eve, and the next day would head back to New York, so we stayed inside most of the time. I hadn’t seen my old friend and his family for many years, and his brother’s kids I’d never even met. His parents had gotten smaller and greyer; tottering around the house searching for glasses, and scolding each other long after the other had left the room.
It was strange to be back in the town after so long. Driving through the main street it looked the same, but the names had all changed. The University was still there, a gothic silhouette frozen in time against the prism colors of the sunset. The old theatre was now a bank, and the Woolworth’s space must have changed hands five times since I last lived there. Driving past the Methodist church I remembered the Reverend hiring us to shovel snow after a big storm, and years later vandalizing it on mischief night and getting arrested by one of my coaches, who was also a cop.
Time moves slowly in these towns, and likewise we slowed to a crawl as we drove past the High School’s naked sycamores casting their twisted shadows on the ground; and the town square, a miniature version of itself to my prodigal eyes. Gone were the family names of proprietors who had served University students for generations. Gone were the family run taverns that quietly served underage students (and enterprising locals) for years. Some of those names had been around since my grandfather was a student there himself. And in their place I saw catalogue names and chains; a Starbucks version of a corner diner. Economic pressure and evolution had homogenized the old place.
But the stone tigers were still there, proud gatekeepers of tradition; the stoic sentinels of a history intertwined with that of the country itself. Rolling past, I wondered at the times I climbed and played on them as a kid. They loomed larger than any sphinx then, and represented something I could never quite grasp; a legacy that did not include me, for I was neither bearer nor heritor of this estate.
The warmth of my old friend’s house – the same one I’d met him in four decades ago – was a salve on the last of my scabby wounds. I found myself asking questions about phantoms from our past, amazed to hear that many of them still lived in the area. A former wise-cracking tormentor was now a solid citizen with four kids, two of them in college, and the beloved, civic-minded gym teacher - a man I deeply resented growing up - was still alive and active in the community. I suddenly laughed out loud, realizing how absurd it was to keep this resentment against a perfectly good man who just happened to represent the community. After all, had he ever given me a second thought after I left?
After dinner on Christmas Eve we drove out to see my second oldest friend at his condominium. I was surprised to see a well lived-in house, crowded with years full of music, books and family photos. A fire was dancing in the hearth. On the mantelpiece was an original figurine of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, cracked and discolored like my memories of that time so long ago, when we first met. A few more spirits of Christmas past stopped in unexpectedly and told me how good it was to see me after so long. We drank tea I’d brought from China and I smiled back at them. It was good to see them too, but as I laughed at dredged up memories I quietly wondered who they were. Later, as the night wore on I went into the bathroom; a small gallery of framed photographs, flyers and my friend’s artwork. Scanning the walls for any clues to my past I finally looked right in front of me, and there we were: sitting on a bench in front of the High School, and I recognized the conditional smile, a half-sneer I have often wondered at when I look at family photographs. My mother used to say I was unnatural in front of the camera. But it was definitely me, although I had to move a step closer to make sure. I recognized the watchband and the demeanor; a mixture of arrogance, self-confidence and abject fear.
Christmas day was a hurly-burly of eggs, chocolate smeared faces, hastily explored stockings, torn wrapping paper, wild excitement, frowns, pleading and a hysteria that only this day can produce in children. After all was said and done I produced a bag of goodies from the exotic Far East that largely failed to impress compared to the battery powered Heavy Metal guitar, skateboard, dolls, clothes and art sets. I looked at my friend and his brother, two middle aged men with their families, and identified equally with the kids. The grandparents seemed heroically tolerant to me, smiling as we were interrupted over and over again by the palpitating kids. I kept wondering when someone was going to tell them to shut up while the grownups were talking.
That afternoon we had a few hours to kill before I would catch my train back to the city. I wanted to walk up to the local park where we spent endless idle hours in our youth. I remembered it in oft-recalled dreams, and was impatient to match my mind’s eye with reality. Borrowing a warm hat, I walked out into the back yard and waited for my friend while he made explanations to his family on Christmas day. The yard seemed wrong-sized in the daylight, and the driveway too narrow; the rim had long since fallen off the rotted backboard where we used to shoot hoops. The garage where we once explored ourselves and made oaths of allegiance was now a rustic wooden shed. Breathing in the cold air I looked around again at this gnome’s world of overgrown shrubs and shabby trees and I knew it was my own.
As we entered the park I could see that much had changed. Gone were the wading pool and the sandboxes where we once drank beer and wrestled. Gone was the chain link backstop, and in fact the softball diamond seemed to be gone too, under the patchy snow. The basketball court was still there, but many of the towering pine trees had been cut down, and this filled me with an unreasonable melancholy. One thing I always loved about that park was how dark and cool it was under the pines on a hot summer’s day.
We had intended only a quick walk up to the park, but now coming out on the other end of it I found I wanted to walk the old streets, and begged my friend to keep going. There was once a transitional neighborhood there, solidly working class and proud of it; but everything now shone under a patina of upward mobility. Where my memory placed a broken down car or a rusted bike frame in a yard, now there was a soccer ball and a multi-colored flag that seemed frivolous. A shingled working garage had been converted into a studio apartment with a shiny red door and a brass plate letting you know who lived inside.
We made a left and headed down towards the lake, walking through progressively larger lawns and bigger homes; Tudors, Colonials, Georgians and an old Victorian corner house that filled me with dread as a kid. I looked at it and tried to recall the feeling, but it was too clean now with its new paint job and shiny shutters. We had breached the University’s realm, and found ourselves walking past professors’ housing. Bikes leaned against the sides of stucco and clapboard walls, and a precisely constructed tree fort rested in a giant elm tree in one front yard. Everything seemed so much more orderly now, and I began to doubt the sepia images of my mind.
Finally we crossed into the former community playing fields, and I realized we were not far from my old house, a place I had almost erased from memory. I knew then why we were walking this way, and I felt a force of history was pulling me towards the lake. Urging my friend on I quickened the pace, suddenly excited to claim ownership of this long banished dreamscape. Here was the field where I broke my finger sliding into second base; where I spent stolen hours playing hooky with my mother one spring day; where I flew my first kite. Now as we walked behind the field into a small copse of woods that hadn’t changed in all these years, I remembered the bountiful jungle it once seemed. Here was the trickle of a stream where I looked for turtles and swung on thick vines and talked my neighbor into showing me hers if I showed her mine. It was all still here. And I was drawn along, just as the water beneath me was drawn down to the lake below.
As we came out of the woods I saw the fields behind my old house where I set up a bicycle jump when I first moved in, mistakenly doing a flip that resulted in blood and stitches and the grudging admiration of the neighborhood kids. My friend reminded me of the time we found spray paint and wrote peace signs, Love and Bill Cosby on the neighbor’s wall and sports car. That got me spanked with my mother’s hairbrush, grounded, and cemented my reputation at school. Yes it was here on this same ground that I played, fought, cursed and laughed with an ardor and fury that went unrequited. It was here that I discovered the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5; here that I read my first books; here that I discovered the escape world of art. As much as I connived for so long to dismiss it, this was my story.
Coming up past my former neighbors’ back yard, the house looked eerily the same. I remembered the day we were moving out, and I was taking a last look at the woods and the baseball diamond we’d made. There was my neighbor’s father, a quiet man with red rimmed, watery eyes who never said much to us kids, sitting in a folding chair with a can of beer in his hand looking out into the distance. ‘We’re moving today’, I told him. He turned to me slowly, as if he hadn’t quite heard me, and I was just about to repeat myself when he said, ‘you’re gonna miss these fields’.