A Sort of Homecoming

Last weekend my wife and I traveled upstate to visit our folks and do our part for the economy by shopping in the malls. As we bounced back and forth between her family, my family and mall madness, we passed through a part of the area, a more countrified setting where my aunt and uncle live, and I remembered just how much time I spent there as a kid. I pointed out to my wife the tree I hid under with my cousins when we performed some innocent hooliganism years ago, there's the field where we went snowmobiling every winter, that house on the hill I always thought was haunted, how I got a vicious scar (that still makes me shudder when I think about it) while playing with the family dog up that path over there, and here's the yard where I devoured The Empire Strikes Back novelization in a matter of hours, a month before the movie opened ... It's strange how easily I transported back to those times. In the (good God) 20-plus years since, there have been so many people and experiences and events I've forgotten, yet these are still so vivid to me - probably due to the fact that I was a fresh, impressionable lump of clay back then more than anything else.

Whether it's the time of year for reflection or some dissatisfaction with where I am these days, I've grown increasingly nostalgic over the last few months. A yearning for a quieter, simpler life. Feeling a compelling need to downshift from constantly being in fourth gear. We've been talking for a while now about moving upstate, to get away from the sensory assault of New York. We've been looking at a tiny, one-intersection, no-stoplight town that I literally fell in love with the second I set foot there. What was it? I couldn't put my finger on it but I knew this was the place I wanted to live. My wife suggested it might remind me of Ireland. That may be. Driving around the small town and its surrounding areas it really did remind me of the more rural villages we visited and passed through in Ireland earlier this year. We'd gone over to trace our heritage which brought us to some of the lesser traveled parts of the country - which, of course, is where my family came from. I believe our blood recognizes from whence it came and a undeniable sense of connection happened (just ask any friend who has had to endure my constant retelling of our trip and my misty-eyed profession of love for, and great need to get back to, Ireland). Could it be that my desire to slow down, to do a virtual 180 degree turn in living conditions, has something to do with that fateful trip? Of course. But I also feel that life is really starting to fly by. Tangent last produced in 2003. Hell, the Red Sox won the World Series over two years ago! I often use the phrase "busy with nothing to show for it" and I'm saying it too much these days. Virtually everyone I talk to says the same thing. It's almost impossible to call a friend spontaneously and say, "Hey, let's get a drink later" because either they've got something else they're off to or I do. I have to slow down because too much time is being spent running somewhere else.

There's a documentary I soon hope to find time to make about my dad's firehouse, about what it was like to be there in the 70's and early 80's. There was a great bond of community, of friendships, of loyalties. These men and their families often spent several nights a week, every week, every year, together just hanging out. They ate dinners together, vacationed together. A 9-5 job was literally that. News came from a paper the next day, good reception from seven channels on TV and the occasional busy signal from the other end of the phone. We have made so many great leaps forward since then and a lot in life has been made easier with one left-click of a mouse. But with all the immediacy available to us, the cell phones, blackberries and an Internet nearly as vast as space and as fast as light that allow us all to remain connected from almost any part of the world, I can't remember the last time I sat in my living room with my wife and our friends and over the course of a few hours, drank a bottle of wine or two and just talked about nothing.

I think to live in this city there is a lot we deny ourselves. We spend so much time here having to close ourselves off to all the obnoxious stimuli that we beome stifled and atrophy, yet we yearn to find a place where we can be open to our surroundings, to take it in and not shut it out. And so we look north. Looking for time, a sense of community, a connection to the land, a reconnection with family and a reinvigoration of a creative impulse. A sense of belonging once again.