Home. Place. Community. Connections.
Driving from the airport, my mind travels a path nearly as well-worn as the Revolutionary Road we are following in the car. Pop out of the airport tunnel and Yes! There is Paul Revere’s neighborhood, a place we have walked so many summers in a row that we feel we owe old Paul some rent. I think about the friends we have walked with: some starting lives in a new part of the country, some watching their mother slowly die, some celebrating milestones in their children’s lives. I pray for them while letting my eyes roam over Boston’s skyline.
Oh! Just passed the U-Haul dealership where David and I rented that first little trailer to bring all my earthly posessions to Florida, days after our honeymoon. I remember watching him hitch the trailer to my car, unsure if this man I’d married even knew how to do such a thing, but counseled in wisdom enough to keep my mouth shut.
Other landmarks of my life begin sliding by: the gas station where we stopped for gas after a close friend’s wedding, the apartment where the old lady my parents befriended used to live in with her cats. She made amazing chocolate cream puffs for us each Christmas, thankful to have a kind of family to celebrate with. Those cream puffs were the flavor of my childhood. I saw them as a treasure — and they were — but not for the childish reasons I imagined.
We enter and exit the death-defying rotary that must have given my parents nightmares when I was learning to drive (why did they never mention how hard it was to see your baby girl behind the wheel?). I pass The Bowling Alley. It is the same — exactly — as my youth group nights. Fleetingly my mind wanders over the friends of my youth, my first crushes (yes Mark, it was you) and my first agonies. I wonder if the memories of my life are as cracked and faded as that old bowling alley that surely should have been renovated by now. Do we automatically do extreme makeovers on our memories? I think we must, because these memories are shiny, loved, lived in. But there’s no time to dwell there, because now we are passing the used-t0-be-disco-that-used-to-be-a-Chinese-restaurant. Aunt Shirley’s car was stolen there, full of birthday presents for my grandparents.
The exit for my childhood home rushes past, but before I can ponder it I am caught by the sight of the Mormon temple. It is new and alien in the familiar landscape of my youth, and so the only memory connected with it is that Mitt Romney lives very near by. But now we are passing the back roads we used to take to drive to my daddy’s favorite coffee shop, and the flood of those memories is so strong that Mitt Romney fades away in a wistful puff of smoke. Now it is all Daddy using up my brain. He’s everywhere in these streets, he and my brothers. It has been seventeen and fifteen years since my two brothers died, and four and a half since Daddy died. It is a long time to have to use the same, never growing store of memories. I greet them like the old friends they are.
Finally we are close to the place we call home up here in Lexington, Now we are walking the sacred ground of early history, tracing the footsteps of John Hancock, Paul Revere and all those countless lobsterbacks. I’ve celebrated early many April mornings as New Englanders re-enact it all every Patriot’s Day. These are the paths I run or walk slowly with the dog and my iPod. They are the community that put its earliest memories into my life, near the church where I learned, baptized, married, and buried.
This is what it feels to belong to a place. It is to me like walking with ghosts. There are voices everywhere, and I recognize them as part of me. I smile, and wonder what voices my daughters will hear when they travel the south Florida lanes of their youth.
But for now it is enough to be welcomed home.
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Okay – there should be a disclaimer -warning:tissue required when reading ::this post may cause tears to well up in your eyes until they cannot hold on anymore and they roll down your cheeks – seriously warn me next time