YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

Thomas Wolfe wrote YOU CANT GO HOME AGAIN as a fictional work.  Stories emerged after the novel was published that his editor had done much of the writing. It does not matter because this book, written about America’s loss of prosperity, especially during the stock market crash, explores the themes of loss, of 

regret, and of failure, and of innocence lost.

George Webber, the protagonist says, “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the 

time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

I recently thought about this novel published posthumously as I remembered my experience with leaving home. As we age, we often feel a desire to go return to our childhood fantasies, to growing up feeling secure and appreciated, and to the small town environment where everyone knew you.

I took home memories when I left at twenty-one years old. 


I also took the experiences of growing up in a huge Catholic family, riding the bus to school, even though I lived just a few blocks away, pedaling my bike at night from my dad’s business to my uncle’s general merchandise store, walking on the blacktopped streets, huddling in the high school while hurricanes threatened to flood our town, eating Sunday dinners with my family and boyfriend, watching movies at the local drive in theater, playing flute and piccolo in band, going out with friends, smelling the scent of sugar cane being processed at the mill, and learning to cook under the supervision of my grandmother.

When I visit home, I still see the one stop-light town I grew up in. I remember vividly the small, family owned grocery stores, the gas stations, dry cleaners, pharmacy, Catholic Church, and especially the farming community that provided a lucrative livelihood for amazing men who knew the science of the earth and gained respect in our small town. 


Most of my best friends are gone to live in big cities. Some have stayed, but the busyness of our lives inhibits visiting.

I go home now to see my eighty-seven year old mother.  I know she won't be here much longer.We sit on the front porch swing and watch cars go by on Main Street, talk about her past, and comment on how the landscape has changed. 

I remind her about the time she wrote a society column for a local newspaper, delegated chores to her children so she could take coffee breaks, kept the books at my dad’s garage, put the radio on while we ate breakfast so we could listen to fairy tales, and master-minded community clubs and organizations with a vengeance. I called her the godmother of the Cajun mafia. Do it her way or not at all.

Her only brother was given the opportunity to attend college because, in the forties, most women married and stayed home to raise families. She has verbal abilities and artistic talent that was seldom recognized. She gave me a journal of her early 1940's high school years. I found over 100 journals hidden in plastic boxes all over the house. I kept some of her drawings, mostly profiles of beautiful women she must have seen in movies. Those are the memories I cherish.

Thomas Grey, a British poet, wrote an elegy about his hometown, the small village of Stoke Poges, in the United Kingdom. In ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, he laments the fact that the villagers may have had great ambitions, intelligence, and amazing talent, but their lives were stifled because of lost opportunities, their inability to become educated or escape their lot. He says,

"Full many a gem of purest ray serene


The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:


Full many a flower is born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

My mother was a "flower to blush unseen." She had amazing 

potential. Had she been given  the chance for intellectual 

stimulation, training, or schooling, as Gray says, she "might have 

waked to ecstasy of the living lyre." 

Those of us who have left with memories of home take with us 


vignettes of our lives. We can’t go home again, but we can treasure 


what we left.