In 1989, there were several reports of tourists being killed while visiting game parks in Kenya. When people found out that we were about to travel to Africa, they asked with alarm, “Should you really go?”
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Africa
Where Have the Years Gone?
Where Have the Years Gone?
I surely don’t remember getting older, but here I am! (See Bus Stop)
And yet although I often forget where I parked my car, or where I left my eyeglasses, I can still remember in loving detail the big rubber boots my father wore as he pulled me on my sled during the northeastern snow storm of 1947. (See Blizzard)
This thing called aging is strange if nothing else , but a saving grace has been this amazing website where fellow writers – many I’ve never met – have become kindred souls sharing some of my memories, my joys and sorrows, my victories and defeats, and even some of my regrets. And reading their stories has helped validate my own, made me a bit wiser, and even more grateful to have journeyed this far!
But tell me please – where have the years gone?
– Dana Susan Lehrman
Stranger Danger
In 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in Lower Manhattan.
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Homer: Semper amati, semper recordati, semper in cordibus nostris
I don’t remember if the first time Homer broke a hole in one of the lower screens and escaped was during a thunderstorm, or during some Fourth of July fireworks...
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Be It Ever So Humble…
Both my partner and I often express our desires to return home. Each has a different version of home, having been born in widely separate locations, economic stability, and cultural surroundings.
My wife is from Manhattan. She was born in Greenwich Village and, when her family moved to a larger apartment uptown, she continued going to school in the Village. As a teenager, she came of age during the golden era of Village life: the bohemian scene, folk music and coffee houses, and all the lame, sexist bullshit that followed an attractive, very hip, politically aware teenager around in those days. In some ways, home to her is still the West Village. Of course, we have seen the Village change over the years, so her desire to go home again is drastically compromised by what the Village has become. We both love New York, but her family properties are gone, and any time we spend a few days in the city’s wintery weather, we look at each other and say “nice place to visit.”
I was born in Boston, but our family moved out to the suburbs as the first ring of post-WWII medical and electronic r&d industry began to form around Route 128, the first Silicon Valley. We moved to Littleton, Massachusetts a small New England town, rural before it became a suburb, a bucolic community full of cows and apples, lakes and forests, and old yankee farmers and mechanics.
A wartime entrepreneur named Ted McElroy, an inventor and the World’s Fastest Telegraphist, started a factory in our New England town, with my father as partner and electronics engineer. However, my father had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, when many idealistic young people joined the party for altruistic reasons. Most of the new company’s contracts were with the federal government, and they weren’t having any Commie bastards building electronics equipment for them.
After my father was blacklisted, we probably should have moved back to Boston. Both my parents were intellectuals and progressive people, and there wasn’t much of a scene for that in picturesque Littleton, Massachusetts. But we stayed on, through my graduation from high school. On one hand, calling Littleton home was great. I was outdoors all the time, riding bicycles over the New England hills, exploring the forests, swimming in the summer, skiing in the winter. Many of my friends were the kids of farmers, so we built forts in hay lofts and got paid for picking apples and corn and boxing potatoes.
However, by the time I was 15, I had read Kerouac’s On the Road and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy, and a raft of other macho manuals, and I had begun to play folk music. At 16, I was driving in to haunt Cambridge coffee houses, mooning over a very young Joan Baez, and getting my mind blown by Jim Kweskin and Bob Dylan. I was ready to bust out of “home.”
After I graduated high school and entered university life, Littleton began to fade. My father died after my second year in college, my mother moved to New York to complete her graduate studies, and Littleton ceased to exist.
California beckoned. Although they had met in New York, both my parents were from California. My California aunts and uncles had kids who were my peers. By 1965, San Francisco was “where it’s at.” Every summer during college, I drove in an assortment of beaters, old station wagons, sedans, trucks, across the country to hang out in the San Francisco Bay Area, just as the scene was beginning to blossom. After graduation, I left the East Coast for San Francisco and never looked back.
In the 1980s, San Francisco’s progressive communities had fragmented and the radical arts scene had deteriorated. My partner and I migrated to Los Angeles. We’ve been here ever since, but, despite building a strong, creative life here, LA has never felt like home.
As we grow older, we are beginning to ask “where is home?”
I love our Hollywood house and its garden.
I grow nostalgic and love the beauty and dynamics of New England. I even keep in touch with some of my small-town school pals, but I doubt we’d move back there.
New York has changed drastically and, although we have many friends there, it would be one hell of a challenge to set up shop in Manhattan or even Brooklyn.
San Francisco feels the most like home — the Bay, the weather, the surrounding eco- and geo-environments but…Would we ever return?
Maybe the answer lies in the title of Thomas Wolfe’s powerful but antiquated 1930s novel — You Can’t Go Home Again.
# # #
The haunting hope of home
Going home can produce dramatic results, but probably not the ones you were expecting.
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Yale: Studies, Romances, Escape
In the summer of 1961, I left my job in Harlem where I was working with gang members as a community worker, for a student life at Yale that catapulted me from clamorous chaos to hushed academia.
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Dorothy
We used to have round robin ball-room dances in gym back then.
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A Kid With A Grown Up Heart
There are nights
when the dreams of that house
break through these bedroom walls,
as the ringing in my ears
becomes the sound of my own name,
echoing through that third floor stairway
into the open pocket doors
of the dining room,
through the nine windows in the sun parlor,
finally escaping into the gravel stones
of the backyard.
An old house
built in the 1920’s,
when building houses was an art-form,
When carpenters carried photographs
of their craftsmanship,
and carved their service into honor
with their hands.
There were so much wood in that house
Wooden beams on the ceiling,
Wooden pillars between rooms,
a wooden mantel above the fireplace,
parquet floors, mahogany furniture.
As a child I’d imagine faces
staring at me in the lines of the wood
ready to leap alive to capture me.
Beautiful carnival glass adorned
the bronze chandeliers in the living room.
From the same room
a stained glass window
looked down upon us from the staircase,
its green stems and red roses
so vibrant in the afternoon light.
I came back home at the age of 50
Divorced, two sons fully grown and gone,
I had to decide my next living arrangement
since my landlord wanted to sell,
I chose to move to the 3rd floor apartment
of my parent’s house.
‘In Retrospect’
these became the best years of my life.
Being back at home with mom and dad
bought an everyday wonder,
a magical presence of my old life
mingling with the new.
I felt like a kid with a grown up heart
who knew exactly where she was.
(to be continued)
Where are you from?
When people ask me where I’m from, it gets complicated. I say, “Well, we moved around a lot. I grew up mostly in Michigan.” However, Michigan was just where my nuclear family lived on and off when not overseas, there were no relatives nearby, and we moved away before I finished high school. In fact, the place that felt most like home to me was the San Francisco Bay Area, my chosen home as an adult for over twenty years; it was so eclectic that I fit in. And then I moved to Canada.
It is hard to return home if you don’t know where that is. Home becomes wherever you have the personal connections of family and friends—and that changes over time.
It is possible to investigate genealogy though. My own roots in America are part of mass European migrations in the 1800’s—my great-grandparents came from the Netherlands, Sweden, Scotland and Germany. My grandparents were born in Minnesota, Colorado, Ontario and Chicago and grew up speaking English. My parents were born in Chicago and Colorado, moved to New York and California, and met each other in China. By the time I came along, the origin stories and traditions were distant history and there were no connections to Europe.
My partner Sally’s brother was keen on genealogy and managed to connect with relatives on the Mosel River who turned out to be wine makers with a long and interesting history—and who greeted her and her brother with a brass band parade when they returned to the valley. Hard to beat that for a homecoming.
She prodded me to look into my own roots, and within a decade or so we had figured out where my great-grandparents had emigrated from, and even visited. There were no parades, but we did meet a few people from the family tree, saw old houses and farms, and visited small towns I had never heard of before. It was curiously satisfying to see those places and feel the presence of history. It made my own moving around seem less unusual.
In fact, the more I learn about the movements of people throughout the world–even back to Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens roots in Africa–the more it seems that migration is the norm, not the exception. It also strengthens my understanding that, in a deep sense, home is this earth for all of us. It doesn’t answer how we can continue to live here.
