In a documentary, I listened to a man explaining what a loaded word “home” is. Maybe it’s the country where his family once lived. Maybe it’s the country where he grew up. More specifically, he feels torn loyalty between his childhood neighborhood and the city where he has made his professional life.
I wonder about these allegiances we believe we must hold to places we once lived.
Many times as an adult, I’ve been asked, “Are you going home for Christmas?” I assume they’re referring to the town where I was born, but I’ve never understood why they choose to call it “home”. True, it was my hometown, but I have not lived there in decades and if memory serves, the entire time I lived there, I wanted to leave.
Home is wherever I’m living now.
Thomas Wolfe was the author who made “you can’t go home again” a household phrase. Even his wise observation—declaring that because of inevitable change, the past is gone forever—implies that a person would want to return to the place of one’s origins again. Sentimentality for people or special events, I understand. A place is just a place.
Despite my efforts to stay away, I have revisited my hometown, mostly for funerals. I made an effort to feel nostalgia, some bittersweet tears for old sites that must have been familiar long ago. I barely recognized the roads I once drove on autopilot to houses and buildings I can no longer pinpoint. More than once, I stopped to question the former existence of a structure obviously older than me. Sad as it may be, I failed to observe my surroundings when I lived in the town of my youth, and the places I knew the best now seem foreign, including my parents’ house.
No, you can’t go home again. I follow that with a shrug. Maybe I’m missing something important.
Wherever my homes have been, however, I do love them. When I’m away from home, I crave being there. As for former homes, they are the dilapidated sets of out-of-date plays.
