I Can’t Go Home Again
Dreams of times past
You had never been in my dreams. For decades after we parted, though, I dreamt of you often.
In my dream, I am frantically from afar trying to find you, get back to you. Yet I can never quite reach you. Or so it seems. Familiar landmarks – gone from where they used to be. The boulevard – blocked. The streets do not cross as I remember. I don’t know which way to turn. “Why can’t I find you?” I cry out. Where are you? Were you ever really there? Or maybe a mere mirage of my own making?
Even after many decades wandering the world, I still remember how you sheltered me those first years of my life. A warm winter refuge – at Dad’s 40th birthday party when I ran inside to escape an evening snowball pelt during a heretofore unheard of (to then-seven me, anyway) Burbank icy snowfall. A sunny summer playground – where I thumb-launched aggies and steelies pursuing those of Alan and Dick across your fragrant freshly mown front lawn. The radiant red and white snapdragons draping your side fence, grape-staked shortly after we’d moved it by Uncle “Mr. Fix-It” George. You saw me off to school each morning, my tummy filled with warm Wheatena; welcomed me home each afternoon with anticipatory aromas of Mom’s evening meal. Your Spanish Colonial, cocoa-colored frame hosting cozy successions of birthday parties, Thanksgiving feasts, springtime seders, Chanukkah giftwrapping, Easter egg dying.
Until that final day, my eleventh birthday.
On that day, as planned, when Sis, Gary, and I arrived from school, you stood empty, cold, closed. No longer home; just a house. Locked out, we waited out front for Mom to pick us up. As we drove away, though excited and curious about what lay ahead, I also felt a wistful longing for the only home I’d ever known. Would I ever see you again?
Over the years, my recurring dream of you grew gradually faint, less frequent, even occasional drive-by visits losing any pang of longing. Now, new colors, new flowers, a new home to new families.
More recently, in my dreams I am always away, anywhere but home, no longer desperate to get back to you. Perhaps it’s that now you are everywhere…and nowhere. And that perhaps Thomas Wolfe got it right.