All of us, at one time or another, have the urge to go back to places we remember. Sometimes we wish we hadn’t. Last December, after the last day of classes, I took an overnight trip to North Carolina just because I needed to get away. As part of that trip, I retraced the route we’d take to visit my grandfather’s summer home. There are so many memories I have of that old house, full of neat stuff he’d accumulated over the years, where time seemed like it had stood still since about 1965. It was full of neat books and gadgets and stuff from an age slightly older than mine. In an odd way, I felt at home in that time capsule of a house.1
There have been times the last few years when I’ve daydreamed about striking it rich2 and buying my grandfather’s old place, fixing the house up and making my own memories there. And last December, there was a “for sale” sign in front of the house. That night, in my hotel room, I looked up the listing. It didn’t take me long to wish I hadn’t. Very little of the interior of that house was still as I remembered it. Everything that made it special had been gutted at least 20 years back and replaced with stuff that looked identical to what you’d find in any other house anywhere else. Some parts of the house appeared to have been damaged. Much of it had been renovated to the point that I couldn’t recognize which room was supposed to be which. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it hurt regardless.3
This kind of heartbreak happens to all of us, in time. It’s the nature of the world. As Dave Garroway was reminded in 1954. During a summer respite, he happened to be near his hometown of Schenectady, New York, and decided to drive through for old times’ sake. He found his maternal grandparents’ old home place and drove out to see what it was like now. Garroway rang the bell, met the family that lived there now, explained that he had grown up there and asked if he might have a look around. It didn’t take long for the realization to hit him, either. “The deer stag’s head was off the wall, and the lamp with the beaded fringe was gone,” he recalled. “Grandfather’s rose garden was now a concrete garage…which all goes to show, you can’t go home again.”
It didn’t get any better when he went out to the old home place of his father’s family. His father, grandfather and an uncle had worked for General Electric, and during the off-hours they ran a chicken farm that kept them engaged in what Garroway remembered as “backbreaking work.” The young Garroways had lived in a cottage on the chicken farm, and it burned down when Dave was two. “I stopped there last summer, too, and looked at the site,” he said. “Growing out of the old ruins was a poplar tree, so big around that I couldn’t even get my arms around it. That’s how old I am!”
Maybe all of us should heed the words of Thomas Wolfe.4
- This is, of course, not to mention the yearning I have to reconnect with my grandfather, who has been gone now close to a quarter-century. It’s a long story but I never got to meet him until I was almost eight years old, and I never really got to know him before Alzheimer’s Disease started to eat his brain.
- By being a well-selling author of biographies, no doubt.
- Of course, given the stories I’ve heard about my grandfather’s estate in particular and knowing what happens to estates in general, nothing of my grandfather’s would have been left in that house anyway. All the furniture and everything else would have sold off or thrown out anyway. Even if by some miracle the house had been left intact, how would I have found all the belongings that made the place his? I’d have spent $100,000 on the house and $200,000 to put it back as it was, and even then it wouldn’t be his.
- Or Simon and Garfunkel, in words whose ache increases the older one gets: “Preserve your memories/They’re all that’s left you.”