GOING HOME

It was Thomas Wolfe who said, "You can't go home again," but, he was wrong.....sort of. Not that you would necessarily want to go home again. Things change over the years. People move, the ditch where you had the Tarzan swing is now condos and there's a parking lot where the little store used to be where you knew how to get a ball stuck in the pinball machine to rack up points and get free games. It won't be the same home you left. You can, however, with the right people involved, invoke all of the memories and emotions that allow you to go back home in your mind to the point of even dredging up sounds and smells, albeit psychological. I was able to do just that a few of years ago when, thanks to Facebook, I was reunited with a friend I had not seen in 45 years. He lives in Miami, but, happened to be in Dallas for a convention. What a remarkable visit we had. Let me begin by telling you that I went to high school at a boarding school after the public school I was attending in Manchester, Ct. realized they had an issue with my being there. If memory serves me, and it doesn't always, it had something to do with an experiment to see if a plastic cherry bomb would explode when flushed down a toilet in the Boys Room. It does. The school I was sent to was then known as Laurel Crest in Bristol, Ct. We ate, slept, studied and created friendships in old Victorian buildings that were beautiful from the outside and felt like prison on the inside. Fortunately for our sanity and our appetites, we perfected the art of climbing down the corner bricks from the 2nd floor late at night for our forays to McDonalds or Dunkin' Donuts, who provided the erstwhile nutrition for our all night poker games in one of the big closets in our dorm rooms. Marvin was a good friend with whom I would play poker, play guitars, study and, yes, climb down the wall and go downtown. Marvin taught me a very cool blues riff that, when I pick up a guitar now, convinces everybody that I possess some prowess at the instrument. I do not. It's the only thing I can play, but, I have to admit that even I am impressed at how good it sounds. Marvin and I graduated together and lost touch. He went on to become a professor at Miami-Dade College and is now retired, watching the dolphins and whales from his beachside balcony. We found each other on Facebook and he told me he was going to be in Dallas for an upcoming convention and wanted to see me. We made it a point to get together when he got to town. As he was walking across the hotel lobby to meet me at the concierge desk, I knew instantly who he was. He told me that without the goatee and grey hair, I hadn’t changed at all. Nor has he, aside from the normal aging signs….a little less hair, a liver spot or two, but, nonetheless, he too was unchanged. We reminisced ourselves back to the mid 60’s and suddenly, looking at Marvin, I saw his brown curly hair, his bright youthful smile and imagined picking up a couple of guitars to play our little blues piece. It was a truly wonderful visit that took us both back to a different time and place, even though passersby saw a couple of old guys chatting in a hotel lobby. When Marvin returned home, he found that another “Crestie,” named Doug, was living mere blocks from him. Shortly after their reunion, I moved to Miami and, for the past three years have been spending time with my old pals on a regular basis. We and our wives get together often and it always conjures up great memories of days when, to quote Billy Joel, “I wore a younger man’s clothes.” We also found, much to our delight, that a number of our classmates spend their winters in the area and we have been able to reconnect with some them. Marvin, Doug and I recently had lunch at a local “rib joint” with Mike and Steve, two other members of the Laurel Crest class of 1965. Other diners saw 5 old men cutting up and laughing a lot - we were back in a dorm room, plotting our escape down the wall to get donuts, meet up with a “townie” girl or just play a little pool. It was at that lunch that I realized that Thomas Wolfe was dead wrong - under the right circumstances…..you CAN go home again.