Sunday, July 11, 2004
You can never go home again
My father worked in construction and there were some years that he sorked out of town for extended periods of time. While most of the time he was able to make long drives home at night and then back to work the next day in 1959 he was working on the I-75 expressway that was being built. This required him to be away from home, sometimes for the whole month before returning home. He didn't like being away from his family for such long periods of time and driving back and forth would mean a four hour drive each way every day, so at the end of our school year we moved to Sydney, Ohio.
That summer was like one big adventure to us kids. We started out with my father hooking up this mobile home to that 1957 Ford and driving down to Sydney. I soon found out what living in a trailer park was like. Anyone living in a trailer in 1959 was considered trash, but we didn't care. We had great fun that summer building a downhill racer made out of old wood and some buggy wheels we found. We dreamt of being in Akron for the great soapbox derby. We never made it, but it was still great fun.
Then school started and if I didn't feel like trash before it only took one day to feel that way after school started. The nearest school in the area was Longfellow school and it was heavy on teaching the bible as well as regular school curriculum. I got off on the wrong foot with the teachers and the school principle that very first day.
Here in this town, when the first school bell rang it simply meant, time to head to our classroom and the second bell meant that we had to be seated and ready for work. There at Longfellow, we had to line up according to our class and teacher so that we could follow the teacher into the classroom. No-one bothered to tell me that and I earned the teachers wrath and a trip to the principles office first thing. Then when in the classroom we were told to open our bibles for study. I had the wrong kind of bible which REALLY set them off. So you can only guess what the rest of that school year was like.
After enduring knuckle rappings and trips to the principles office for seven months we headed back to our home in Whitehouse. My father had gotten hurt on the job and was laid off so we came home. I was elated, to say the least, to get out of there. We had been gone for ten months and I thought it would be great to get back home and tell of my experiences. I thought that once back at my old school, things would be different.
I had made only one friend, other than my cousin, in all the previous years there, but even he treated me as though I had the plague. No-one ackowledged me anymore. Not my cousin and not the boy whom I had thought of as my best friend. Again I was the pariah. I was a stranger to them all simply because I hadn't followed them through the last seven months of school. Not even the bullies who had taunted me in previous years acknowledged my existence. I was a ghost to them all.
I never got that feeling of coming home until I was forty-four years old and it never came from coming home to my hometown. I felt as though I had come from another planet.
No, you can never go home again. I would learn that lesson again later. As far as this small town is concerned, once you leave, you are abandoning them and to try to return is next to impossible. You are a stranger to them after only a short time gone, and they don't trust strangers.
So, for another 36 years I never felt as though I had a home to come home to. Nothing ever was the same for me after that.
That summer was like one big adventure to us kids. We started out with my father hooking up this mobile home to that 1957 Ford and driving down to Sydney. I soon found out what living in a trailer park was like. Anyone living in a trailer in 1959 was considered trash, but we didn't care. We had great fun that summer building a downhill racer made out of old wood and some buggy wheels we found. We dreamt of being in Akron for the great soapbox derby. We never made it, but it was still great fun.
Then school started and if I didn't feel like trash before it only took one day to feel that way after school started. The nearest school in the area was Longfellow school and it was heavy on teaching the bible as well as regular school curriculum. I got off on the wrong foot with the teachers and the school principle that very first day.
Here in this town, when the first school bell rang it simply meant, time to head to our classroom and the second bell meant that we had to be seated and ready for work. There at Longfellow, we had to line up according to our class and teacher so that we could follow the teacher into the classroom. No-one bothered to tell me that and I earned the teachers wrath and a trip to the principles office first thing. Then when in the classroom we were told to open our bibles for study. I had the wrong kind of bible which REALLY set them off. So you can only guess what the rest of that school year was like.
After enduring knuckle rappings and trips to the principles office for seven months we headed back to our home in Whitehouse. My father had gotten hurt on the job and was laid off so we came home. I was elated, to say the least, to get out of there. We had been gone for ten months and I thought it would be great to get back home and tell of my experiences. I thought that once back at my old school, things would be different.
I had made only one friend, other than my cousin, in all the previous years there, but even he treated me as though I had the plague. No-one ackowledged me anymore. Not my cousin and not the boy whom I had thought of as my best friend. Again I was the pariah. I was a stranger to them all simply because I hadn't followed them through the last seven months of school. Not even the bullies who had taunted me in previous years acknowledged my existence. I was a ghost to them all.
I never got that feeling of coming home until I was forty-four years old and it never came from coming home to my hometown. I felt as though I had come from another planet.
No, you can never go home again. I would learn that lesson again later. As far as this small town is concerned, once you leave, you are abandoning them and to try to return is next to impossible. You are a stranger to them after only a short time gone, and they don't trust strangers.
So, for another 36 years I never felt as though I had a home to come home to. Nothing ever was the same for me after that.
Dana Megyesi 2:14 PM