When I was a child living in a town of 2,000 people, all the kids went to the movies on Saturday night. At Christmas, colored lights were strunk from pole to pole for the two blocks of downtown. My dad’s store in the middle of all this was thriving for 35 years – as were the other businesses including five dress shops. I didn’t go back much after my father died in 1989. My mother moved away to another small town to be near my sister.
When my mother died, she was returned to my hometown for funeral and burial. I didn’t let myself look at the town when we cut across at the stop light. But I went back later that month to make photos with an old friend for a class reunion. It was gut-wrenching for me. All of the stores downtown were closed or falling down. There was a tiny drugstore on one corner. No soda shop. The theater had collapsed. No high school. Many of the beautiful old houses were gone. My favorite street in the world, bar none, was pretty much deserted.
When you’ve lived in a town and known everyone, it is so painful to know they are mostly all gone.
The people who bought our family residence of 50 years have kept it in beautiful condition, but I won’t go inside. But at least I have that – and a photograph of it in the snow.
It was hard not to think of some of the Westerns my rowdy buddies and I saw together. The ghost towns always made me sad and frightened. I never dreamed…
So sad…I just read an old book by Pierre van Passen-(“Days of Our Year”)-in it, he relates his return to his old town of Gorcum, Holland. He saw his family house now a garage, all his friends gone. So sad and melancholy.
I live just a few miles from Hicksville. I like the neighborhood. I do miss the old “My Pie” restaurant, though. They had the best deep-dish pizza around. It closed about 25 years ago.
McMurphy,
You were right. The book was published posthumously. Some say that Wolfe was even alluding to the rise of fascism in Germany (1933+). Wolfe died in 1938.
From my experience based on my 63 years on this planet the answer is no.
As the old saying goes, the only thing constant in this world is change. That is why you can never truly go home again.
Today my wife and I drove through the neighborhood where I grew up from the late 50’s to the early 70’s. The passage of time has, in all honesty, not been kind to it. Many of the houses are in need of some serious maintenance and repair and many of the houses have let the landscaping go to pot, complete with dirt yards and dead plants. It was never that way when I was growing up there.
When I was a kid in this neighborhood I also saw it through a child’s eyes rather than an adult’s. That also gives one a very different perspective.
I had a pretty much an idyllic childhood with a stable and loving family and lots of kids to play with. As much as I loved growing up in this neighborhood I would never want to live there again.
Things in life change and you have to adapt to those changes – there is no other choice.
My first true love dumped me for a new guy she met at her new college when I was 19. I pined for her and thought that if I could just get her back my life would be complete and we would live happily ever after together.
Well, 2 1/2 years after we broke up we ran into each other and started seeing eachother again. But we both realized after a short period of time that there was nothing left for us any more as a couple. As much as I thought I would always want her, it turns out I didn’t any more. We had both grown and moved on with our lives so we mutually decided to part ways, never to see eachother again.
I sometimes think about her and wonder what she is up to. But in the end I just hope she is doing well but do not have any desire to see her again and she probably feels the same way about me.
I have only gone to one of my high school reunions – my 20th. I skipped the 10th, 30th and 40th.
My experience at the 20 year reunion was that after I initially greeted an old classmate who I hadn’t seen in many years, once we had updated eachother on things like where we lived, what we are doing for a living, our marital and family status and “how we have been” there was not much else to talk about. The conversations became forced and awkward.
A few months after attending the reunion I was out riding my bike near my old high school and saw that the gates were open so I decided to ride around the campus. The impression that I came away with was that it looked like a dump – poorly maintained, the landscaping looked terrible and it needed a paint job about 10 years before but didn’t get one. I wondered that day if it looked that bad when I was a student there. It also didn’t bring back a flood of nostalgia either. I haven’t been back since.
Yet, I very much enjoyed my time in high school and have fond memories of my time there. Part of it is what you said in your post – I was a teenager when I was a student there and now I have a very different perspective as an adult.