going home again
I was supposed to spend my 65th birthday this past May in York, England, near the end of a three-week British Isles trip with my husband and my brother, Kirk. As geopolitical events started to affect the travel industry in April, we decided to pull the plug on our trip, too anxious about fuel shortages in rural Ireland and Scotland and flight cancellations that would wreak havoc on our itinerary.
As I fumed about my lack of control over these events, I asked myself, “where do I want to be on my 65th birthday?” The answer came immediately: My hometown—where else? My husband and brother were on board.
I hadn’t been to New Orleans in six years, and I thought it would be a great place to celebrate my birthday. I found a wonderful historic hotel in the Garden District and looked forward to all of the amazing food I would eat.
Kirk and I don’t usually exchange birthday or holiday gifts anymore, but I told him for my birthday I wanted him to create a “this is your life” day for me. He loved the idea.
We left our hotel early on the morning of May 29 and headed out to the suburbs of Metairie where we had lived in three different houses over the course of our childhood. Kirk queued up a Spotify playlist he had made for the day—top singles of each year of my life, starting in 1961 (we stopped recognizing the songs around the late 1990s!).
We drove by the first house, where we were born but had left when we were quite young. The second house was where we spent the bulk of our early years. In the 1960s, that house was in a wonderful small neighborhood full of kids. We parked the car and walked down the streets, marveling at how small the neighborhood was, when it had felt so large when we were kids.
Memories came flooding back—climbing the tree in our front yard, attaching playing cards to our bike spokes with clothespins so they made that wonderful thata that that sound when we pedaled, watching the teenage girls who babysat us put on makeup before dates, playing games of dodgeball in the street, avoiding the one street we were forbidden to walk or ride our bikes on because a “bad man” lived there.
As we stood in front of the house we had lived in, a woman came out to get into her car. My brother ran up to her, introduced himself and me and my husband, and said we had lived in this house in the 1960s and early ‘70s. After chatting for a few minutes, we learned that she was the aunt of the little boy who had lived across the street and had been Kirk’s best friend and that she and her husband had bought the house from my family 53 years ago.
Kirk and I were hoping she’d invite us inside so we could have that really strange experience of walking through a house you had lived in as a child but hadn’t been in for decades, but she didn’t.
After leaving that neighborhood, we drove to the school we had attended for parts of elementary and middle school, as well as day camp in the summer. Kirk had gotten us access to the school, so we walked around the old buildings. The wooden cubbies attached to the walls in the hallways were still there, just waiting for lunchboxes to be stowed inside and jackets hung on the hooks underneath.
I stepped into my 7th grade classroom and clearly visualized math class with Mr. Suter, who, chalk in one hand, scribbled math problems on the board and, with the other hand, smoked a cigarette, and Mrs. Barthels, who taught social studies, with her bright red lipstick, sitting on the edge of her desk, swinging her legs, her slip showing under her dress.
While we drove around Metairie, Kirk dropped hints about a mystery guest joining us for dinner that evening. When we got to the restaurant, Kirk made me sit with my back to the door, but he didn’t realize I was facing the window and could see people approaching the restaurant. A woman who appeared to be in her 60s walked up to the restaurant, and I thought, “could it be ... ?”
Kirk had tracked down and contacted my childhood best friend, whom I had not seen since 1983. As she approached our table, I had that odd feeling of time collapsing and was at a loss for words (What do you say to someone you hadn’t spoken to in 43 years? “Great to see you” doesn’t seem to cut it.).
After catching up on 40 years’ worth of life, she pulled up Facebook and showed me several of our high school classmates’ pages. So many of them I wouldn’t have recognized at all. But my friend looked the same—her lively blue eyes, big smile and bubbly personality were just as I remembered.
Maybe you can’t go home again, but you can approximate it in a meaningful way, even if just for a day.