Tou can go back...sometimes

It was a short drive yesterday, and with the change to Central Time I was an hour early. With this blog in mind I detoured to the small Indiana town where I grew up from just before my third birthday until I left for college. It was my first visit in almost 30 years, and it was unexpectedly unsettling.

It wasn't just that everything was smaller, that my old school was closed, and that I no longer remembered the names of many of the 300-odd people who used to live in the town's 100 houses. I had already experienced those things during my rare visits in the 1960s and 1970s.

It wasn't even that the school has become the "Fifth Street Club" (photo right), that the old tubular fire escape I used to climb on weekends has been removed, that the two old maple trees that used to shade the front of our house are gone (photo below), like many others in the town, or that the grain elevator at the center of the town now lies derelict.

No, what struck me most forcefully was my own irrelevance. The town is living its own life that I will never again be connected to. That's my own choice - I didn't even knock on any doors to see if old acquaintances still lived there, as I might once have done. But the town has changed, and I have changed, and when my life is over the town will continue to live in ways I will not have known or influenced. Even though I saw traces of my family's and my passage through the town, yesterday I didn't belong there.

Enough of that. The rest of the day, and so far today, has done a lot to lighten the gloom of that visit to my past and other people's present. After a very happy reunion with Mike, a close college friend whom I hadn't seen in 45 years, now a rabbi in Indiana, I arrived at the home of my friend and former colleague Yolanda and her daughter Nicole. These visits, plus a gathering at the Chicago home of Yolanda's mother, prove what I had learned from Rachel: that you can maintain and even restore the human contacts that matter.