Coming Home
My oldest son asked if we could drive through my old neighborhood.
My youngest and I had driven through earlier in the week coming home from his art classes Downtown and when he told my oldest about the trip He wanted to see for himself.
We passed my old high school, Closed.
My old house, Abandoned.
My grade school, Closed.
Mary’s party store where we bought chips and pops and rubber balls to play strikeouts or baseball in a parking lot we nicknamed “wimpy”, Abandoned and burnt.
The park where we built bike jumps and trails and played baseball and took girls to kiss behind trees, overgrown and rusted.
As we drove past, my son commented that everything in my past is gone now. It had never quite occurred to me in such a blunt way but he was right. My parents put down roots in the Suburbs after leaving Detroit but I have no deep roots or ties to the place. It’s a nice town but it’s not my home. When we decided to settle down, marry, and have children, we bought a house in the Suburbs as well and we will stay here until the boys go away to college. It is definitely their home but I have no deep feelings for this place either. It is a nice safe place to raise kids and has good schools.
It holds no place in my heart.
Everything I do hold dear, the places that made me the person I am as I moved from child to adolescent to young adult are gone. Abandoned, razed by bull dozers, overgrown by nature, and unrecognizable.
I suppose that none of us can ever truly go back. Time changes everything. Time moves forward. The past flickers and fades away.
“Dad, everything in your past is gone”.
That innocent statement leaves me with a lump in my throat and my brain snaps to something my youngest said to me just the other day,
“You know there is no such thing as the future?, there is only right now”.
Quite a deep thought for a 12 year old but I suppose it’s my own fault. He plays too many video games, so I’m making him read. He chooses books like the Art of War and has taken to random deep statements as of late.
My past is gone.
There is no such thing as the future.
There is only now.
The moment.
The second.
The park I played in as a kid is freshly mowed in my mind. The box is freshly chalked on the back of the school ready for a game of strikeouts. My childhood home is always there waiting for my return. The windows alight with a warm glow. My friends and I have scrapped enough money together to buy a fresh white rubber ball from Mary’s party store with a bit left over for a Faygo to split and maybe even a pack of gum.
The future lies brightly ahead.
The beauty of this moment is that I know that both my sons are right. And they are wrong. My past is not gone. It is in me. In them. In their yet to be born children.
The future does exist, forged by our will.
It is shaped by the past, and the now.
And the next now
And the one after that.