Member-only story
We Can’t Go Home Again But We Should Try Anyway
Saying you can’t go home again isn’t just a cliche, it’s a fact. But it doesn’t mean we should never try. We should, however, temper our expectations to reality.
We come to terms with time’s disappearing because we grow older ourselves. But like time, place is tied to people. If people we associate with a place are gone, so is the place.
One particular episode reminds me of this.
On a men’s softball league, while in college, someone started bragging about his slugging. Our best player — who had pitched for the college and nearly gotten drafted to the MLB — interrupted: “Why don’t you and I walk around the dorm halls sometime?”
It made for great laughs, but I reminded him that no one at the university knew who he was anymore. His baseball glory days, while great at the time, were a distant memory to then-freshmen-now-seniors and unknown to all underclassmen — those now living in the dorms.
I recently went back to that town, and, although I enjoyed seeing it and the few familiar faces who continued into grad school, it seemed eerily similar to how I imagine time travel would be.
College towns are unique like this because they attract mostly out-of-towners, who want to attend cheaply in a city away from home. Because these towns don’t offer much for graduates, the transients get their degrees and move on with life. Once they graduate, they are replaced by a new crop of 18-year-olds, who will repeat the process.
Despite the human churn, however, a college campus’s aesthetic remains mostly the same. New restaurants open, and new buildings are built. But these colleges never become unrecognizable to alumni. In many ways, returning feels like visiting a place frozen in time — only all the people have been replaced. It gives one the acute sense that he knows the place, but no longer belongs. He recognizes no one, and no one recognizes him.
This reinforces the reality that our experiences in life revolve around people — not the locations we inhabit. We use terms like “love” to describe the place where we grew up or currently live . This isn’t necessarily because we love the scenery, but because we love the people there. The scenery simply reminds us of those people and the…
