The old way home

 

Time marches on.

The more things stay the same, the more they change.

Yes, I did flip the cliché. Said things change the more they change.

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my parents. Stayed in the old house. I’d tell you I stayed in my old room, but I didn’t. I picked the bigger room with the bigger bed. Still, huge sense of familiarity and comfort.

Each day of my visit, I went out for a walk. I switched up the route every time, and my mother joined me for a couple of them. One I was kind of excited by when I set off was most of the route I used to travel when I walked every day to elementary school. As the car drives, the length one way is just about a mile. As with anything, a turn here or a crosswalk there can change the end result by a bit.

As kids, we would head down to the end of one circle and cross the lawn of a family we knew really well. That led us into a wooded section with a brook that flowed steadily and provided hours upon hours of exploration and fun during my youth. At least the major portion of that land had been developed about twenty-five years ago, with a new road and some houses built. But other than this section, the neighborhoods were remarkably unchanged.

And it’s in that lack of change that the passage of time became evident.

One house has added a sunroom-style sitting area in the front. Someone in my grade lived there, and I had been inside many times growing up. I don’t know if his family still owns the property, but it seemed from a distance to be a nice little area for relaxing a bit. It was also one of the few changes to any existing property that I could really be certain of.

All the other houses, including ones of friends and classmates, even appeared to mainly be the same homes, with the same shutters and same colors. It was a bit of an eyebrow raiser, since my parents have changed the house color, then moved to siding, brought in a shed and added a small room in the back in the years since I moved out. To see so many places looking visually the same with no changes at all seemed somewhat comforting thanks to the familiarity, but also felt wrong.

Wrong?

Yes. Wrong.

Countless houses were aging, and not too gracefully. Many needed new roofs. Some required a lot of repair and replacement parts before you would even consider beginning a decent job of repainting it.

One friend of mine had an older sister that bought what seemed to us at the time to be a pretty great car. In the back of the house where he lived a car was partially covered by a tarp. The portions exposed were incredibly rusty, and seemed to belong to what remained of her vehicle.

The biggest changes of all awaited at the school.

When you go a place perhaps 1,500 times in your life, the memories are imprinted rather strong. Seven years, one-hundred-eighty school days per year, that alone easily clears 1,200 days. Start adding in using the grounds to play, or to cut across to the park, or for community meetings and organized events, and yeah, I remember the school.

The basic structure is still there. Same two wings with an all-purpose room extending out toward the back. Separate building that had been the kindergarten remains in place. But a lot had been modified. Some portions seemingly repurposed and redesigned.

The part that sticks with me about all of it though was out back. A playground. That’s been added since my days at the school more than four decades ago. On a bench in the playground was a small plaque. It was dedicated to two people for their tireless and generous efforts, and years of service at the school. And that’s when it really hit me.

Those two people could have joined the school staff at any point in the 1980s, with it possibly their first job. They stayed there, perhaps got married and had kids and sent those kids to school and then watched them get married, and eventually they retired. That plaque didn’t have a date. Looked new enough. Maybe there only a year or two or three. These two wonderful people may have delivered thirty-five to forty years of never working any place else, and while there experienced a lifetime of personal activities from marriage to kids in college to grandchildren arriving. And yet, I am old enough today and long past my days of education at this school that my journey never crossed paths with theirs.

Lifetimes—literal lifetimes—had moved along since I regularly walked these roads on a daily basis.

The truth is, you can go home again. But all that’s old isn’t necessarily still wonderful, and all that is new isn’t necessarily bad. The real world is a bit more complicated than that, especially if you just let sit without some attention.

 

If you have any comments or questions, please e-mail me at Bob@inmybackpack.com