I get back to that little town where I was raised many times
a year. It’s been over fifty-five years since I left home, on the day after I
graduated from high school. Something happens to most of us in our last years
of high school. It’s a good thing and the one thing that helps you grow up into
the person you want to be. It’s that same unsettled feeling, that made people on
the east cost 200 years ago pull up stakes and pack everything they owned in a
Conestoga wagon and head west, To their minds then-- and to my own on graduation
day, there had to be a better way.
I want to be clear; I wasn’t leaving a terrible life. Quite
the opposite, I was leaving a loving family behind and it bothered me a lot. I
was leaving the only home I had ever known. But like a young wolf pup, leaving
the pack, I needed to find my own territory. Something told me that once I
found that territory I was seeking, there would be a mate in the works and once
I found that mate there would be pups and yes-- all of that came to pass. Then
at some point, you start slowing down, and then you finally stop and experience
fulfillment. Instead of looking forward anymore you find yourself looking
backward, ruminating on all of your memories.
The other night I went back to that small town where I lived
and rode down Main Street once more. I passed Lefty’s bar, still there, where we tipped a few way back
then, passed the same drug store that must be in its third or fourth generation
of family owners, I passed so many places that used to be familiar but now
places where only strangers to me live and work. I drove by the now empty lot,
where the house I grew up in used to be, and the high school that was a grand
old red brick building with a prickly hedge around it, now gone and a more
modern building in its place. Down Fourth Street I passed the cold and
shuttered Movie Theater, where Tom Mix and Gabby Hayes had come to life on the
silver screen and where you took your girl in your teens to make out in the
balcony. Passed that old Dutchman, Doctors office, I believe his name was
Riechelderfer but my dad called him wrinkle diaper, because he delivered all of
the babies in our family. I passed
the depot that still looked the same as always but stands strangely quiet and
not the way I remembered it. The barbershop where a cut was six bits and the
B.S. from Dick was free. Passed faded storefronts and run down buildings and it
all seemed so sad.
I sometimes think we sense everything around us aging and
changing as we go through life but we never look in the mirror. People change, town’s
change, and yes we change but the one thing we don’t accept easily-- is change--
so personally we tend to ignore it. Yoko Ono said. “Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one
remembers one’s exuberance. Fall passes and one remembers one’s reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance. I think sometimes age
is meaningless except for our physical appearance and that’s because our
insides don’t age as fast as our outsides do. That is unless you want them too.
Lets face it men. If we all looked as good as we think we look---well let’s
just say-- this would be a wild and crazy kind of world.
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