You know how in the movies people who have been away from home a long time see the front porch of their house and get all misty? Like, someone is waving onion fumes at them the minute they see concrete steps and-as the swanning orchestral music swells-the hero/heroine puts their fingertips to their lips (because we all always do that) and says: Oh my God, I can't believe I'm home again in a fragile and shaky voice? How going back home is almost always a cathartic and beautiful thing?

Yeah.

Sometimes it's not.

This isn't about visiting my dad, stepmother, and new grandma (whom we've taken to calling Grandma PoPo around this house as she's extremely cool and very Japanese, so the word "purple" comes out "popo". I digress.) My stepmother said that we should tour our old home when Angus and I got there, and so we did.

When I was 4 years old my family moved from Lubbock, Texas, to McChord Air Force Base, which is right outside of Tacoma, Washington. These were still the military years for my dad, so moving every 2 to 4 years was the norm. McChord was our family home from 1978 to 1982, at which point my parents divorced and my mother, sister and I found ourselves living in a little hole in Iowa (and that is definitely a digression I don't want to talk about.)

Gig Harbor is not far from McChord, so off we went in the car to see the place we used to call home.

And my God-I can't believe how small it is. You know when you go back home and you see the place you grew up in and you think: Jesus, when did this place shrink? This place was huge! Or maybe you did grow up in a huge place, it's just me that comes from humble origins, I dunno.

We drove onto the base-my father is retired from the military, which means he still has base and military privileges. I remembered virtually nothing from the area-for some reason I could remember the house number and how to walk to school, and I could remember the pond in the backyard and where my best friend (the other Helen, Helen Sqaured) lived, the friend that I'm pretty certain wound up walking down teenage pregnancy lane and now smokes 2 packs a day and covers her furniture in naugahyde, but of anything else? There was very little.

My memory, though...my Swiss cheese memory. It always lets me down regarding the past, especially concerning the younger years. My brain had a hole in it and the memories just leaked down my back, making a small sweat pool around the band of my neck. These years, specifically these early years-they don't ring any bells. When I think of those years I feel instant embarassment, I feel my hair long over my brow, I think that I will never grow into who I need to be. It was in this time period that I started to understand something was wrong with me, I was broken in some place that no Miss Piggy Band-Aid could reach. I didn't fit, something didn't fit, and with my typical tenacity, I clung to the different as a way of staying sane.

I maybe make as much sense as a bookmark made of green beans, but maybe you get my drift.

My family was stellar going with me. It's not like I was freaking out (because I wasn't), but my Dad and I talked about memories. It's nice being the one to be able to reminisce for a change. When I'm around Angus' family and I constantly hear stories about people that I will never meet. When Angus' is with his best friends-some of whom he grew up from infancy with-I feel completely out of the loop and sometimes dive into my imagination to amuse myself when the talks go on and on. This time I got to talk about my past, and my Dad tried to piece in logistics that had escaped me.

When we got to the street I had lived, I remembered nothing.

I remembered the house number, but I couldn't have picked it out if I tried.

Then, my Dad pointed it out to me.

I wouldn't have recognized it-the color has changed, for one. When I was a kid I remember it was a blue-grey color, the color of a bird's egg, the color of the angry sea sky. Now all the houses are a muted yellow, a calm color, a color that makes it hard to figure out which is which if you don't live on the street. I couldn't believe how small it looked, but maybe that's because I'm now all grown up and able to reach the cupboards in the kitchen. I wondered if that's the place where we wrote our names in the top of the closets, to try to make a stamp on the place, but then I think I'm getting confused with Colorado and the military paints after each occupant, anyway.

A few things came back to me-a tree had blown down in the front garden while we lived there, and missed hitting the house. My mother grew roses in the side garden. I had run around in the backyard in the summer, and one summer a trap door spider came up out of the ground and bit my heel, scaring me. I tried to fry an egg on the sidewalk once (that was a failure.) The sky went dark when Mt. St. Helen's blew up in 1981.

Many things were a complete blank.

Not really a surprise.

What was a surprise was my old school. I started kidnergarten there, with a mean bitch of a bag called Mrs. Pratt, who liked polyester and had huge clip-on earrings that looked like cherries. She was always mean to me, and was startled when she found out that I had been helping another girl in the class learn to read, as I already knew how to, had done since I was 4. It's not that I was particularly helpful, it's that the other girl was as hated as I was and we knew we had to band together. Strength in numbers, really. Even when you're 5. Like Childhood Normandy.

My old school, which also had a really cool teacher named Mrs. Altman, one who somehow hits the corner of my mind as someone that tried with me. I was very high energy and probably very hard to control. I also was hard to get through to, although I worked very hard to earn praise.

Wow. About as pathetic as a frat boy at a palace reception.

Anyway, the school was also very, very tiny. I remember it being a maze of hallways and covered walkways, in my memory it spreads the length and width of an entire city block. The truth is, it's maybe as big as a few houses.

And it's also now closed.

You don't think of things moving on like this. It's not like the world has to hold still if you're away or anything, I know that (see: Lucky Charms. See also: Trix.) But it's a bit sad when something's not only moved on, it's left completely.

Oh well.

Maybe I'll never get the memories back, and that's ok, I think they won't fit anymore anyway, much like how you could never get the pantyhose back into the L'Eggs cup, no matter how hard you tried (and don't tell me you didn't try, we all tried, it was part of the mystery). Things grow out of us just as we grow out of them. My therapist will probably be glad I went to the house and the old school. And honestly, so am I-in general I feel much better happier in myself.

When we drove away, I wondered just a bit about my humble beginnings, and where I am today.

I felt gratitude.

I felt sadness.

I felt ok.

-H.

PS-many thanks to absolutely the coolest geek I know.

PPS-and a late thank you (I am a dozy cow sometimes) to Larry, for the DVD with the holiday inspiration.

PPPS-my email is behaving most whorishly these days (or actually, it isn't-instead of being provocative with Amazon and Ebay emails, it's withholding from me. It's a mail tease.) so if you have sent me a mail and haven't heard from me, it's likely because my email is a Victorian prude. That, or because I'm a dozy cow. I'm working on both. I'm also heading in to a three day off-site conference this morning, and that won't help, either.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 06:48 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 1475 words, total size 9 kb.

1 It's amazing the difference in perspective when you revisit a place you were as a child. The massive house of my toddler years has somehow shrunk down to a cottage.

Posted by: ~Easy at January 09, 2007 12:20 PM (FKBK3)

2 That happens to all of us. I once drove down a street of my childhood with a girl who had lived on it when we were children (we were back there for a reunion) and she had the same reaction, almost textbook in it's similarity to others..."Oh, my God, it's so small!" But you know what I bet: if you found your childhood classmates, they would remember you with fondness and not at all the way you see yourself. I know because that happened to me and boy, was I ever surprised.

Posted by: kenju at January 09, 2007 01:48 PM (L8e9z)

3 Thanks for sharing your experiences! I drove by one of my childhood homes last year and just stared in shock. It was so tiny! Funny how 4 feet of growth can skew your perspective. Also, you are like She-Ra - Princess of Power to me right now. Why? Because you said a trap door spider jumped out and bit you as a child, and the paragraphs following that weren't filled with mindless screaming. Ever since I learned there WAS such a monster as a trap door spider - Damn You Discovery Channel - being attacked by a spider like that is one of my worst fears. If that was me, I'd spend at least a year sitting in a corner, drooling and babbling to myself. So. You ROCK.

Posted by: Heather at January 09, 2007 02:24 PM (s0rhn)

4 I took my wife to see the house where I grew up. I remembered the gigantic hill of a driveway, where I had taken my share of tumbles. Anyway, the driveway looked like someone had washed it and put in the dryer. On high. I'm almost as tall as the hill now. One cool thing: I saw two trees, one of which was an oak that I used to climb all of the time. The other was a mammoth tree that I had no memory of whatsoever. When I got close, I saw that is was a crabapple tree. Then I remembered: I had planted the darned thing myself when I was around 10 years old. Dug the hole, stuck the thing in and watered it. Looks like my TLC kickoff really took that time, which is kind of neat considering that I usually have a black thumb with growing things. Actually, the tree probably survived because I moved away. Anyway, it's amazing how different things look after a couple of decades. Thanks for sharing your memories- and your life- with us. And you are a sweetheart for calling me cool. Really misguided, but very sweet.

Posted by: physics geek at January 10, 2007 06:22 PM (KqeHJ)

5 I bought my childhood home from my parents, and although we only have two children and my parents raised three here, I don't know how they did it. The place gets smaller everyday. When my therapist once asked me for my earliest childhood memory, I could remember a few things from kindergarten, and everything else to about fourth grade just runs together. Sometimes I wonder why I would ever want to go home again. But I am always glad when I do.

Posted by: Teresa at January 10, 2007 09:52 PM (cr8Ck)

6 I pretty much gained my full growth before high school so the house never shrunk on me. And my childhood school is still pretty massive— but alas, they tore out the enormous play structure (which actually had three levels in places) and replaced it with your run-of-the-mill new structure which doesn't get over eight feet tall. I don't really blame them... the old one was the unpainted metal and wood that shed splinters the size of your finger, but that's still sad. They also got rid of the monkey bars entirely. I almost broke my neck on them once. (Didn't realize it at the time, though older, wiser head that says that my fall was dangerous also says that there was a lot less mass. Maybe that's why kids survive. They're light enough.)

Posted by: B. Durbin at January 11, 2007 01:35 AM (tie24)

7 I was just thinking about that myself. Funny how places shrink behind our backs.

Posted by: caltechgirl at January 11, 2007 09:25 PM (/vgMZ)

8 But to some degree, being able to get such wonderful perspective on where we are now is the very best of reasons TO go home again, for better or for worse, I think. P.S. I know I already squealed...but *squeal*! I'm so happy for you and Angus!

Posted by: Jennifer at January 12, 2007 12:48 AM (RlFqM)

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