You Can’t Go Home Again

In this world of too much change and chaos, I’m constantly looking for something stable, something from my past that I could return to and be comforted, like my childhood neighborhood. But everything is gone now, because, at my age, I have little connection to the home I grew up in. My parents are long gone, and only one neighbor (the mother of my childhood best friend, age 99!) still lives on the old street.

Of course, the neighborhood has changed in the 60 years since I grew up there. It’s become wealthier with bigger houses and fewer children. Although the small shopping center a block from my childhood home still exists, nothing is left except for the grocery store where I briefly worked.  Everything else is gone: Huebinger’s Drug Store where my girlfriends and I would buy comic books; the Gift Box, where we would agonize over which stuffed animal to buy with our babysitting money; and nearby the library that was my refuge.

There’s another refuge from my past that I want to go back to: a lake in Wisconsin where I spent the happiest days of my childhood with my family: swimming, boating and reading under the birch and pine trees. Although the family cottage still exists, the lake has changed: bigger homes, less wilderness and louder boats. What was once a clear lake is now filled with weeds, and all the development has chased away the chipmunks and frogs.

Even my beloved places in the Colorado mountains are disappearing. Wildfires have destroyed some of my favorite trails, and old mining towns that had stayed much the same for 100 years are now filled with condos and new mansions. 

There was a time when things didn’t change as quickly. Both sets of grandparents lived in the same neighborhoods in Chicago for their whole lives—one in the Czech neighborhood on the west side and the other on the north and German side. My grandfathers worked the same jobs for their whole lives, while my grandmothers shopped at the same grocery and department stores. Each couple (and their families) attended the same neighborhood church, where they were married, their children baptized and their funerals held. Because they lived in the same place their whole lives, they knew all their neighbors, who also rarely moved. And so a community was formed—at that time (the 1930s-50s) composed mostly of people from their own ethnic backgrounds. Of course, this resulted in an ethnic insularity that often kept out people of different backgrounds and races.

Even though I’ve lived in the same neighborhood for more than 30 years, everyone around me keeps moving, so there are only two houses in a three-block neighborhood where I know the residents. It’s a disorienting feeling, and I think contributes to our sense of anxiety in this world. Along Colorado’s booming Front Range, new subdivisions are taking over once empty fields. Nothing stays the same, especially the landscape.

Even something as small as losing my favorite restaurants can disrupt my personal landscape. Especially during the pandemic many restaurants closed permanently. Though that may seem trivial or unimportant, especially compared to more serious issues like failing health, it’s a loss in our day-to-day lives. You lose a place that you’ve been going to for 25 years—a place that felt comfortable, where you celebrated birthdays or anniversaries, where the chicken pot pie always made you feel better. When other long-time stores and restaurants close, the losses start piling up and one day you realize that all your favorite places are gone. At the new places, the music is too loud, the menu has food you’ve never heard of, the chairs are metal, and everyone there is 30 years younger than you.

It adds to the sense of dislocation, of a world that is out of control. It’s especially hard for seniors because we adapt to change more slowly. All I want is the booth at my once-favorite hamburger joint, but Tom’s Tavern has since been replaced by an upscale restaurant that serves “wood roasted octopus, with curried carrot purée, candied bacon, roasted turnips, asparagus, black garlic aioli.” Since Tom’s closed I’ve become mostly a vegetarian, but if the tavern were magically resurrected, I’d beat a path to their door to enjoy their hamburgers and fries, while sitting in a booth and watching the shuffleboard players. Just for a while, it would feel like home.