I was born in New Yawk City. You may have figured this out. I spent 18 months there, tops, and it seems to have spoiled my attitude permanently. I grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, next to the birthplace of rock’n’roll – great music, great radio, great art museum, great place basically to be, well, from. And then college, and then our fair city, from which you could not dislodge me with Semtex.
But in between Brooklyn and Cleveland Heights, there was a brief stop in Danbury, Connecticut. My folks dreamed the American Dream – a house in the ‘burbs, away from the hustle and bustle and grime and beggars and smog and, well, everything a right-thinking person would love about city life. So my mom designed her own house, had it built, and moved in – and two years later or so, my father’s company shut down his division and told him there was no other room at the inn. So off we went to Cleveland. My mom would have been crushed, if she’d had enough self-esteem: living in the house she always dreamed of, two years out of 74.
Me, I was, well, 18 months old, and we left when I was 4. But this house had deep memories for me. It was the site of my first big boy bed – I remember one night, lying in it, not being able to see the edges, they were so far away. I remember lying on the sofa with a fever in the living room. I remember the flagstone fireplace, the stairs down to the basement where the garage was. And I remember, vaguely, the yard, the stand of trees next to the house, and the friends, and various other brief instants. I even remember, oddly, that the address of the house was changed while we were living there, as the development grew larger. But the last time I saw this house was 1966. Until a couple weeks ago.
My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I drive a lot. We have friends all over the country, and we love the freedom of the road, our own car, just tossing stuff into the back and leaving. We’ve just returned from a lovely vacation to DC, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and, well, hey, we’d been talking for years about driving past the ancestral home, and there we were on I-84 in New York, and – oh, what the hell.
So we darted into a rustic, rural community, right off the highway. We found the map on our iPad. We found the road. We drove slowly – 1, 3, 4, 5, there’s the stand of trees, and – not the house. Oh, there was a house there, all right. But it wasn’t the house I remembered. There was no garage under the house, at all. I stared at it for a few minutes, drove past, drove back. It was the right vintage. It was the right address. But it was all wrong.
I found this hilarious. I called my father later and asked him about the details I remember, and they’re all correct. And I checked out the house on one of the real estate sites on the Intertubes, and was built at the right time. In other words, someone has remodeled the hell out of my house, so much so that it isn’t even recognizable.
SWMBT tells the story of someone in her hometown who, when asked directions once, told the inquirer to make a turn “at the IGA where the IGA used to be”. Our lives are mapped out by the locations that make an impression on us, and for us, they’re always there – even when they’re merely haunting the current inhabitants of a completely different building. There’s nothing wrong with this; but it speaks to the insistent passage of time, and the right of the next group of folks to create their own impressions out of their own dreams, build their own houses, open their own Starbucks where the cows used to roam.
You can’t go home again. Half the time, you can’t even find it.