Fond Memories

Going Home

“...I had become aware of a painful paradox—that we long for the day we can leave the place we call home—to stretch our wings and fly the nest. And then, once we've flown, no matter how far we've gone or how old we become, or how our vision of the world has changed, there remains in us like a lodestar a longing, a yearning, a hope, to go back to that place we first so badly wanted to leave.”

Chervis Isom (The Newspaper Boy)

The great take-away from my trip to Chattanooga is deeper compassion for my parents, who were young-old-people when we lived there. Still in their 20's, they had one child with spina bifida occulta, and one who'd spent the first two years of her life in a convent hospital with asthma. While there, mother gave birth to a third child, who sustained brain damage in a hospital incubator. How on Earth either of them coped, I will never know, but I do know they were stronger than I will ever be.

It was Thomas Wolfe who said, “you can't go home again.” Chervis Isom captures the truth of that in The Newspaper Boy, his memoir about life in Birmingham during the Civil Rights era. When he left town on his way to college out-of-state, he understood that life as he knew it—that protected cocoon of childhood, when everything is familiar and predictable—was over, never to return. Most of us “boomers” remember our childhood as a time of free-range living, when we tested all the boundaries, and made more than a few stupid mistakes. It is only in the rear-view mirror that we begin to question whether the life we lived was flawed; whether our parents were people to emulate or forever deny. Later still, we realize how like them we are, and how well they functioned under the circumstances.

“Going home” is such a strong metaphor for finding the simplicity and safety of our original shelter. We imagine that it was many things it was not, whether good or bad. Our “memories” are not cast in concrete. Like the parents who gave us the best years of their lives, they are flawed. The very best we can do is pay homage to “home,” appreciate the many ways we were shaped by it, and give thanks that we've lived long enough to recall and recount. It may be fiction, but it is none the less our truth. 

                                                     In the Spirit, 

                                                           Jane