Throughout my life, when I’ve been asked where I was born, and I responded with “Hartford,” more than half the responses were, “Connecticut?” Hartford, although the largest city I’ve ever lived in, is considered a small community. Back when I lived there, it was just under 9,000 people and is currently around 15,000 strong.
Although I was only six when we moved, many bits and pieces of the memories I have are pretty clear. I’m sure some aren’t totally accurate as your mind has a tendency to fill in the blanks when you forget things from long ago. But I’m going to tell you about them as if they were gospel. It’s my blog, I do what I want.
Right now, you are saying, “how does this tie in with your title?” Well, stop being so impatient. I’ll tell you. Recently I took a motorcycle ride and ended up in ‘my hometown’. (Queue Bruce Springsteen) You expect there to be changes when you return to places from your youth, especially thirty-six years later. Being that young, I didn’t go downtown often, so I don’t have any memories of main street. But when I got to my neighborhood, nothing looked the same. Our house was completely different. The big side yard had another house in it. Our big back yard now had a big garage in it. I thought the end of the street was the alley, but I found out from my siblings that the road carried past that by at least two more houses.
The big hill I used to push my big wheel up and then stand on it while I rode it down, barely looks like an incline now. I remember my best friend, Davey, lived across the street, but I have no idea which house was his. None of them look familiar. There’s still a car wash behind the old house, but it looks nothing like I remember. I don’t think our old church is a church anymore. When I rode past, it looked like there was a mannequin dressed in 80s female concert goer gear out front. Thrift store maybe, or just some strange event going on.
Although a little saddened because things weren’t exactly how my mind remembered them more than thirty years later, I began remembering fun times (and not so fun times) that still made me smile. I rode around some more and saw an alley that I’m pretty sure my brother’s friend lived on. He had a Saint Bernard that I got to ride like a horse. Rode past the mill pond where my brothers would take me to go frog hunting. We’d bring them home and Dad had to cook them because Mom said they looked like little baby butts so she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
There were also lessons learned. I remembered my middle brother pushing me on my pedal tractor as fast as he could run, then losing control of said tractor which netted me a lovely smiley face scar on my knee. What lesson did I learn you ask? Was it to hold on tighter to the steering wheel of my tractor? Nope, the lesson is, “it’s all my brother’s fault.” I remembered walking outside and seeing the same brother and our cousin looking in the trunk of a car. I walked up and wanted to see what they were looking at. Not seeing me come up behind them, my cousin closed the trunk on my head. You guessed it, my first head scar. Six stitches I believe. What was the lesson here? To make sure people know you are around them before sticking your head in a trunk? Nope, somehow that was my brother’s fault too. Trust me, everything was his fault back then.
There were some lessons learned through observation as well in my youth. The large tree in our front yard grew at a bit of an angle. Not like a 45, but not a full 90 either. I witnessed my older brother try to ride the middle brother’s bike up said tree. I don’t think he got the desired result. Lesson learned: when trying a stunt that may wreck a bicycle, never use your own bicycle. I watched my brothers play catch with a metal tipped dart. How you say? There was a piece of round metal ductwork pipe hanging from the ceiling in the basement. They each had a piece of wood. One would throw the dart through the pipe, and the other would catch the dart with the piece of wood. This was fun to watch, until one of them caught the dart with the hand that was holding the board. Then it went from fun to funny…. because it wasn’t me. Lesson learned: don’t play darts with my brothers.
As my ride to the next stop continued, I started thinking of those trips “up North” we took in the summer to go stay at my Aunt and Uncle’s land. Riding minibikes and sleeping in the pop-up. Riding up there “in the way back” of the station wagon. Good times, but still, lessons learned. Lessons like deep soft sand is hard to ride a minibike through, you can only hold your shoe on an exhaust pipe for so long before you foot starts to get hot, people who don’t swim so good should not follow their much taller sibling out into the lake, marshmallows taste better brown than black (again, my blog, my opinion….but I’m right), and of course, bed wetters should not sleep on the table made into a bed if you ever plan to eat on that table again. Feel free to ask my therapist about that last one.
What does all this mean? What can I take away from all this? What does it mean that you can’t go home?
The general consensus is that “you can’t go home” refers to things physically changing over the years. Going back to your hometown, you won’t recognize it anymore because everything will have changed and evolved over the years. Time doesn’t stop.
I tend to see this a little different, because, well, I’m a little different. Can you physically go home? Yes, of course you can. What you can’t do is change anything that happened there in the past. You can remember as much as you can possibly remember from your past, but you can’t change it. The past is set in stone. You can only learn from your past. Try to repeat the good if you can. Try to do similar activities to what you remember fondly. Try to learn from past mistakes and not repeat them, over and over and over…….
I went home. It wasn’t what I remembered, but it triggered so much more. It triggered smiles and happy memories of a simpler time in my life. A time of virtually no responsibilities. No concept of time. No stress or anxiety. And of many lessons learned.
Thanks for taking the time to give this a read. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe took a little something away. Or it at least put a smile on your face. We all need that these days.
We’re all in this together. Luv Luv.