Going Home

Deep in the last century, Thomas Wolfe wrote “You Can't Go Home Again,” and, of course, he was right. The thousands of pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was our lives have long since been scattered to the winds never to be reclaimed, at least not in a way that we remember them. Too much has changed, too many people from those days have moved on, too much has been forgotten. But sometimes, if we're lucky, we can catch a glimpse of what was, and sometimes it can seem incredibly real and incredibly immediate. Such was my good fortune recently when I visited my boyhood home in White Plains, New York. What I hoped would be a glimmer of my past turned out to be as close to time travel as anything I am likely to experience in my lifetime.  

It has been on my bucket list for some time to return to my old home. I'm not sure why, really. Likely a nice blending of sentimentality and curiosity. As it is for so many, the home in which we spent our childhood has a special place in our hearts. The memories are sweet; there's a certain serenity and warmth associated with it. We were young and felt protected. And, with those thoughts in mind, I wrote a letter to the occupants not knowing who they were. After all, my family left the house a half century ago. In the letter, I introduced myself, explained my interest and included copies of some old photos showing me as a child in front of the house to prove my bona fides. I was delighted with the response which was both prompt and enthusiastic. What I had not bargained for, or remotely considered, was that the folks to whom my parents sold the house a half century ago still lived there. I was stunned. And, that fact added to my urgency in making the visit that I had long hoped for. Lily and I had a long planned visit to the New York area to visit close friends and the opportunity to re-visit the past now beckoned.  

We headed up to White Plains with our friends, Tom and Ellen. Our path took us up the Bronx River Parkway, a scenic, bending and generally lush path through Westchester County that I recalled with such great fondness from my youth. We passed through Mt. Vernon, Bronxville, Tuckahoe, and Crestwood each mile seeming more and more familiar to me. When we ducked in to White Plains, there was so much I did not recognize. The city has exploded from what was once a nice suburban outlier to now a thriving metropolis with soaring towers, wide boulevards, and a host of gleaming new buildings. Ah, but the street names were the same, and as we worked our way from downtown to my old neighborhood, I ticked off all those very familiar, but long lost, guideposts: Main Street, South Lexington Avenue, Martine Avenue, Post Road, Bryant Avenue, and then Ogden Avenue. As we approached my old block of Ogden Avenue, I was caught up in a euphoria we don't often get to enjoy. And, when we reached the block on which my old house stands, I realized I was holding my breath. How do you explain to someone what it's like to have memories come to life? To take form and move and not just be imprints that you have held inside for decades.  

I got out of the car and was met by Amy, the daughter of Irving and Rita – the home owners. I must tell you that when I entered the house it took my breath away. I touched the walls as if they were life forms, not just wood and plaster. It was all the same as when we left it. Yes, the walls were different colors, but the structure was the same. It was an emotional moment for me. Irving and Rita spoke of Sam (my father) and Susan (my sister) as if they had seen them just a week ago, like time had never passed. They invited me to take the tour, and, as I did, I noticed certain things. There was a wall sconce in the living room that was there when we lived there. I used to remove the light bulbs when my parents weren't home, use the sconce as a basket, and would crumple up a wad of paper as a basketball and play games that were feverishly real to me. I pointed to the old cabinets in the living room which were still there and laughingly said that one of them was my folks' liquor cabinet. They advised me it was theirs as well. In the back, behind the living room, was what we called the TV room, and it was still called that so many years later. They asked me if I remembered the dining room wall paper, and I did. It was coral with images of a white leopard. That paper was gone from there, but they opened the hall closet and there it was – the same wallpaper – lining the closet. Upstairs, my bedroom was exactly the same as when I left it, except for the furniture. The wood paneled walls, the cabinets, the shelves – all the same, never altered. I sat on the bed and looked out over Ogden Avenue and a thousand micro-memories flashed through my head like so many life-filled electrons jabbing at my memory bank.  

Even the bathroom, now one of the most changed rooms in the house, brought back a memory long lost to me. When I was a boy, I was plagued by a bronchial condition that often would compromise my breathing. It provided me with the scariest of moments I can recall from my youth when I was not sure where my next breath was coming from. In those dark moments, my parents would usher me into that bathroom where they had turned on the shower to create a steam room atmosphere in the hopes it would ease my breathing. In one such episode, I recall being there with my father and I told him I couldn't breathe. He gave me a long kiss which I realized years later was because he thought, in that moment, he was losing me; that I was dying. I hadn't brought back that memory in decades, but there it was.  

On the way out of the house, I stopped to acknowledge the Japanese maple tree in the front yard. We had planted that tree so many years ago, and, as a child, I watched it grow as I did and marveled when it surpassed my height on its way to a glory I could only imagine. Now, it is fully mature. It towers over the yard with a massive trunk and boughs reaching upwards, far away. In what I can only characterize as an impromptu moment of perfect blending between sentimentality and anthropomorphism, I found myself giving the tree a hug and giving the bark a kiss. Clearly, I was lost in the moment.  

I said good-bye to the wonderfully gracious Irving, Rita and Amy and returned to the real world.

But, what a memory.