I just got back from a too-brief visit to The Ancestral Homeland, a place that always makes me nostalgic for a past that never was. As I have surely said before, had my mother not dragged me away against my will at age 11 kicking and screaming, I almost certainly would have fled the place at age 18.
TAH is one of those places that makes you think of the song where Dar Williams sings "bet that crumbling mill town/was a booming mill town in its day." Massive factories built in the 1800s sit boarded up and economic redevelopment has been tried and failed probably a couple of dozen times since Amalgamated Industries and Acme Manufacturing started slowing production down in the 1960s. Amalgamated's building and logo still looms over downtown, with probably 5% of the workforce it had 30 years ago, and I think that the only reason the place is still running at all is that it's cheaper than paying to close it for good.
Like a lot of medium sized industrial towns, a 15 minute drive takes you into the sticks. The rolling hills outside of town were filled with the autumnal gold and scarlet of maple trees in sunlight. The weather was simply amazing -- clear and blue and comfortably cool. I drank some fresh cider and, like Proust and his cookie, was taken back to the past. In my case, it was to an apple-picking outing with my parents a few years before my dad got sick. Just before we left in the wood-paneled Country Squire, we stopped to watch them press the dropped apples to make cider, and then each drank some right from the press.
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An elegant dismount, Jackson. You had me smelling apples on one hand, on the other contemplating that inscrutable "why?" behind the truth everybody who leaves home inevaitable understands... That you can't ever really Go Back.
The place I grew up in might as well be Mars at this point. But, then, the place I am doesn't feel like home much, either.
I wonder if there's something wrong with that feeling right... Like if it ever feels real comfortable, you know it's time to move on. That you're wasting time in which you should experiencing new things.
That'll drive a man nuts, that push and pull between wanting comfort and needing to do so much other shit before they shut off the lights.
Maybe that's why going home has a bit of phony nostalgia. Perhaps it's a defense mechanism. We want to feel like we've gone so far from it and we haven't.
I go back and forth on it, I guess -- the sense of place that some people seem to have when they have grown up in one town stayed there. I think that the rootlessness and mobility of the post-war era have damaged something about our culture sometimes.
But I also know that that same sense of place can feel like a prison sometimes. And that in those parts of the country where there is no mobility (the rural and urban poor, for example), whole generations are trapped.
I guess the bottom line is that we all look back sometimes and regret either that we are disconnected from our roots or trapped by them. Pick your poison.
And, as Frost says, home is where when you have to go back, they have to take you in.
I can confirm for you that you would have been dying to split by age 18, if that offers you any comfort. And yet, judging by the number of people from high school now raising kids in my pseudo-ancestral homeland (my parents were the only members of the family to settle there, rendering my actual ancestral homeland somewhere in flyover country that I was never actually from), you wouldn't have made it out.
AON (clearing throat), I really need to cut down on my use of parentheticals (but they are so useful!). Starting tomorrow (maybe).
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