"You Can't Go Home Again"

[williejc]

The timber has been clear cut; four wheelers have damaged stream beds; their riders have littered once clean areas; and crime has come to the country. So I visit the rural cemetery where friends and family have rested for 150 years.

[Dienekes]

When my kids were small I would occasionally visit my Dad up in the small town on the northern border where I grew up. For a while when I'd walk around town I'd "see" things as they were when I was small; except that as time went on it was obvious that the decades were piling up. I buried my father next to my mother there ten years ago and the house was sold. We own a couple of cemetery plots there but the truth is that I went away to school at age 13; then college, service, and LEO; and so my actual time there from that time to this was minimal. Most people I knew are gone now, and no reason to "go back". A lot of my memories now feel like things that happened to someone else long ago--and the bad stuff doesn't matter much anymore anyway.

I retired early and decided (correctly) that my money would go further in Wyoming than Montana, and I could have the lifestyle I wanted in either place. A preschool grandson keeps me in the here and now, and God willing I will stay healthy enough to use all the guns that clutter up my safe.

The only "home" that concerns me any more is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_uFq5BYays

[Coal Dragger]

I left home in Missouri at 18, did my first year of college, the the USMC, reserves, more college, Iraq, and a couple of years living in Springfield, MO. After Iraq I wanted a change of location and career. So I got a job railroading in western South Dakota into Wyoming and haven't looked back.

Haven't been home in over a year, probably won't make it back this year either. I haven't lived closer than 100 miles to where I'm from since I was 18.

[Averageman]

Ain't that the truth. There was a girl a year ahead of me in high school I'll call Jane. Jane was gorgeous and had the most perfect body I've seen. Fast forward 10 years, I saw her name on Facebook, expecting her to be a swimsuit model or something. Holy crap, I'm sorry I clicked on her name. Her face looks about 30 years older than her, she's put on a "couple" pounds (and by a couple I mean about 200), and she generally looks like someone from the cast of Honey Boo Boo. A few girls I knew in high school have lost their looks a little bit, but the floor just dropped out from underneath poor Jane...in her case, probably literally.

The last time I saw that many Chins was at a Chinese family reunion.

[markm]

That's the important stuff.

I think it's saved my life.. or saved me from snapping or doing something counter productive. There's been times when EVERY other thing is going wrong... Shitty Job, Nutbag Wife, etc.... and we head out and kill it for two hours. Huge stress relief.

[Ed L.]

I'm lucky to be able to ride skateboards with my son in some of the same places I used to ride 25 years ago. We go to the same skate shop and the smell of new shoes, clothes, equipment is completely unchanged. It's very soothing.

That is very cool. Both you and your son are lucky.

[Ed L.]

Here is another thought on the thread. I'm around Steyr's age, and back then things were much simpler.

Life in general was simpler for most folks, and it was especially simpler for kids. I imagine life is always simpler for kids since there is not enough to worry about and not as much responsibilities--unless you are living in some type of abusive home situation or poverty.

[chuckman]

I grew up on Camp Lejeune. Was stationed there, too. A few years ago I drove the family through the neighborhood in which I grew up...and it wasn't there. Major bummer.

The town I grew up in after my dad retired from the Marines is only 10 miles from where I live now. I lived there until December, 1999, when I got married. The town remains small but taken over by a very young and liberal population, moving out from a nearby college town. Property prices have skyrocketed, micro brews replaced hardware stores, kitchy art dealers now sit where the soda fountain-drug store was. I mourn the loss of my town, and no, I can never go back. It can never be the same place it was when I was a boy, and not only because of the reasons I mentioned, but also because as I get older I make more, and different, memories.

[glocktogo]

This was the title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe, and Wikipedia has this entry on the topic:


"Wolfe took the title from a conversation with the writer Ella Winter, who remarked to Wolfe: "Don't you know you can't go home again?" Wolfe then asked Winter for permission to use the phrase as the title of his book.

The title is reinforced in the denouement of the novel in which Webber realises: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

The phrase “you can’t go home again” has entered American speech to mean that once you have left your country town or provincial backwater city for a sophisticated metropolis you cannot return to the narrow confines of your previous way of life and, more generally, attempts to relive youthful memories will always fail."


Anyone ever return to the place years (or decades) later that you maybe grew up in and felt somehow disappointed, or, conversely, that nothing has changed? Talking to guys my own age (I'm 54), some of them expressed surprise (and occasionally dismay) that their old hometown wasn't exactly as they'd left it 30 or 40 years before. I guess we all want those things to remain constant.

I grew up on a cattle ranch outside a small town of 3,500. It's now a bustling suburb of 45,000 and my childhood home was razed for a housing development. I've been halfway around the world and yet I live exactly 1.3 miles North of where I was born and raised. It isn't the same, but it's OK in a different way.

[J8127]

I won't have to be 56 to notice, the first time I went home after joining the military I was like 22 or 23 with 2-3 tours. All my friends were overweight, needed to shave, and going nowhere. All the girls got married to these losers and got knocked up and stayed fat. They will all die within the same city limits they were born in. This happened in like 5 years, it was completely mind blowing and I haven't been back.