A great day in the desert! April, 1971.
Jealousy. That’s what I’m feeling tonight. Plain, simple jealousy. One night a couple of years ago my friend called me on the telephone to announce that she was going “home.” I mean, really going “home”—back to that little town out in the desert where we both grew up about a million years ago. Back when engines were enormous and gas was cheap, 5-inch Brazier Burgers were 40 cents apiece at the local Dairy Queen and AM radio was king.
I can’t read her mind, and I don’t want to talk out of turn, but I think I understood some of what she was feeling at that time. During our phone conversation I wondered out loud if she was wanting to go home or if she was really wanting to get into her car and drive back to 1965. I cautioned her that 1965 is no longer to be found on U.S. Highway 80, and she said she understood. I was skeptical, but I’m not skeptical anymore.
Over the past year I have become convinced that she knew what she was doing and that it has all turned out right. Every time I talk with her she tells me how happy she is to be home—how happy she is to be back in the desert, back with old friends and, I think, back with that part of herself that she left behind when she left home and set out into the world so many years ago.
I love my friend, and I couldn’t be happier for her. Still, I have to admit that I’m a little jealous. Just a little, just tonight.
I’m not jealous that my friend is back in our old hometown while I’m 1500 miles away. I’m jealous because, when her heart persuaded her to go back home again, she knew exactly where to go. She knew exactly where home could be found, the precise spot on the map. Tonight I’m longing to pack it all up and go home, but I can find in my heart no directions to lead me there again.
Home isn’t just a place, not even for my friend. Home is a state of mind that fits the spirit comfortably like a favorite old t-shirt and faded jeans. It’s a place where you know the land, and it knows you—where you can talk to the trees or the mesquite and hear their replies. It’s a place where you know you are wanted, and a place where you know you fit in. It’s a place where those you love surround you, where loved ones live close by or live on in familiar places in your heart.
Most of all, I think that home is where you remember how to be yourself—how to be all that you were before you adapted, compromised and made deals with life. Back before your mettle was tested, back when you were too young to be unsure of your mind, and back before the cards were shuffled and the stakes became high. Back home, you always know who you are and who you want to be.
I remember once in the summer of 1974 our VW bus broke down in the tiny town of Paragon, Indiana. It took four days to get the needed parts shipped by Greyhound from Indianapolis and to make the needed repairs, and we had to take lodging in the town’s only motel—a field with 5 old Airstream trailers, each with an exposed light bulb hanging on a cord from the ceiling above a mattress and worn out coil springs.
During the day we sought refuge from the summer heat that beat down upon the trailer and steamed the interior like a clam by sitting in the shade of a stand of trees a short distance up the roadway. We drank cold root beers in big bottles pulled from the cooler at the filling station where we’d left the bus, and the days passed as slowly as the pace of that little town.
It was a wonderful time. Paragon was lazy and peaceful, and we felt safe, hidden away in the shade of the trees. I’d like to go back some day and see if those trees still stand along the roadway.
I’d like to walk on the mountain that overlooks that little desert town where I grew up like I did with Mary Ann on a beautiful April afternoon in 1971. And, I’d like to find again that motel room on the backroad outside St. Paul, Minnesota where we finally wore out the portable table hockey game that was our companion on our two-year trek across America.
Somehow tonight, those places and a thousand others all seem like home. It’s ironic in a way. All these thoughts come to mind just as time is tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that it’s time to move along, to leave the home where we’ve lived for nearly a quarter century—the home where we raised our son from a little boy to a man and lived most of our lives together. Time is telling me that it’s time to go home, wherever home may be.
When we go, we will leave many things in this old house. Things that live in the accumulated years that lay as piles of memories within these rooms, in the millions of words and laughter that will ever reverberate in the walls. A part of us will stay behind and haunt this place as long its walls stand, and we will take with us the love that gives those things meaning.
When it is time to leave this place, I want to go home. Finally, home.
My friend stopped in to see us on her trip back home. After a great day of visiting, laughing and enjoying being with one another again, she stepped up into her truck and headed off in the direction of home. Tonight I am jealous. For her, home was so easy to find.
