You Can Never Go Home Again

I spent the rest of the weekend in Geneva, just hanging out. Karen, Barb, and I did a lot of eating, it was great - the both of them are fabulous cooks. We went over to their friend Steve’s house and cooked a huge steak over an open fire and roasted marshmallows for dessert! It was awesome!

On Sunday I took a drive up to see Bubbi. He had invited me to a party Saturday night but I wasn’t up to going and being the oldest, soberest person there, so I went up just to see him on Sunday. And can I just say, I wish I never had. I do not consider him a friend anymore. He proved himself to be a ridiculous joke of a person. Part of me feels like it’s good that I found out now, part of me wishes that I had just gone along being ignorant, because at least it was one more "friend" I thought I had made along my way. Yeah, right.

Here’s the deal, in a nutshell: Bubbi has this ex-girlfriend that still likes him but doesn’t treat him very well, hence she’s the ex-girlfriend and not the girlfriend. So anyway, she knows that he and I are friends and it drives her nuts. When I was in NYC with Patrick I got a bunch of nasty text messages from Bubbi’s phone, which Bub and I later figured out were from her. She stole his phone to send them to me, because that’s mature. Bubbi still likes her too, because he’s a complete idiot, and because I guess it adds excitement to his boring country life. He actually admitted it at one point. "I just love the drama," he said. Uh, yeah, what a winner. So I drive 2 hours up to freakin’ Oswego to go see this kid, who’s been bugging me for a month to do so, and the first thing we do is go out to lunch. The second thing that happens is Bub gets a hateful text message from her, something about "Why is that bitch’s car in your driveway?" This continues all throughout lunch, which only lasted, mind you, about 35 minutes, tops. Then we get back in Bub’s truck and drive back to the house.

"What do you want to do now?" I ask.
"Um, you’ve gotta go. I have to go calm her down," he says.
I drove two hours. We had lunch for 35 minutes. And now he was kicking me out. Because his EX- girlfriend was throwing a tantrum. I was incredulous. I mean, it’s not like he and I are dating or anything, but still, that’s insanely disrespectful.
"You’re f*cking kidding me, right?" I said. "Don’t you remember what I told you when I left the last time?"
"I know, I know. You said I shouldn’t let people push me around. But I can’t help it. Look, I’m really sorry, I am. Really. But, um, can you move your car so I can pull my truck out to go see her?"
I walked out onto his porch to do so. "You’re pathetic."
"I really am sorry!"
"Not as sorry as you will be when you realize you lost a friend." I walked over and hugged him one last time. "I’m not coming back," I said. "You don’t get a second chance to save this."

Maybe I was too harsh, but come on, y’know? I’m enough of a stranger everywhere I go, I don’t need to be treated like a stranger by someone who is supposedly a friend. And gas is expensive enough without me driving two hours out of my way to go see someone who does that when I could have been having fun with my aunt. What a dick.

I was so sad at first, and then mad, and when I get mad I have a bad habit of getting tattoos. My hummingbird is a product of one night when I couldn’t sneak my 17-year-old brother into a club I wanted to go to in LA when he was visiting me. We went to the tattoo parlor instead. My ladybug was a post break-up present to myself. So this time I knew I was going to get the yin-yang heart, feedback from you readers or no. I changed into a button-up shirt so the guy could put it right in the center of my chest, but when I held it up it was too big for my liking. They said they couldn’t make it any smaller, so I put it on my ankle instead. I mean, I have five tattoos, but I dare anyone to look at me and say any of them look trashy. If I had put it on my chest it
would have looked trashy.

So I got it and then went back and hung out with Karen, Barb, and Steve some more. They barbequed chicken and made corn-on-the-cob and fresh bean salad. It ended up being a great night!

In the morning I woke up and said goodbye to Karen and Barb.... then I went back upstairs to sleep for an hour! When I got on the road I was a little nervous - I was going to a town called Cassadaga, NY - a one-stoplight number that you’ll miss if you blink. It is the same as every other one-stoplight town I’ve passed through in every way except one: I was born there.

My family lived there until I was seven, when we moved to Maryland so my dad could find a better job. I have very few memories of the place, but the ones I do have I cherish deeply. For people that have lived in one place all their lives, it’s hard to understand the feeling of not remembering the first seven years of your life. Growing up I wondered if I really remembered anything at all, if the things I did were just dreams I’d had. One time I asked my mom if Cassadaga were a real place, or just a place in my mind. That’s when she pulled out my baby book to show me pictures. But there weren’t many pictures of the town, so even then it was hard to remember.

It’s like having a hometown that you can’t describe. Things are fuzzy. You remember shapes, colors, but not really anything concrete. So what you do remember, you cling to. It becomes romanticized in your head as this magical place, someplace you belong to that belongs to you as well. The few things you do remember become very important - one person, a couple places. These things are forever etched - and forever perfect - in your mind. It’s an odd feeling, really, when you sit and think about it. Which I have, probably too much.

I’m lucky in that I have a sort of guide to the place - my friend David, "my oldest friend" I call him. He is from the town and our parents were good friends. He and I were born three days apart and spent a lot of time together as kids. He-Man was our favorite game. I was Te-la. He was Battlecat.

We lost touch, as seven-year-olds would, but I got back in touch with him just last year. It was funny catching up on 17 years of stuff. He lives outside Chicago now but was nice enough to talk me through finding the place, and to give me a heads-up on what is still there and what’s not. He is the person I remember the most from my time there, besides my "grandparents", good friends of our family who were elderly. Sometimes talking to him is hard because I have to hold my tongue a lot, and for anyone that knows me well, you know how hard that is. I hold it because I don’t want to say too much, or gush over being so excited to talk to him. See, he’s one of those people that doesn’t know what it’s like to not remember..... so to him, I’m "the girl that moved away." Meanwhile, he is, like, the giant foam-head mascot of the first seven years of my exsistence. But really, that is a big responsibility for someone, y’know? Almost unfair in a sense, especially since he never asked to be. So I hold my tongue; not well, but I do. But still, it’s awkward. I know he gets a little annoyed sometimes when I ask too many questions or ramble on, but he is very good at being gracious about it.

So thanks to David’s stellar directions, which I didn’t follow, I was on my way to Cassadaga, which is in Chatauqua County. I took Rt. 20 all the way from Geneva - it’s the long way, but I wanted to see the countryside. I was so glad I did. The drive was absolutely beautiful - unlike the manicured farms of Pennsylvania, the farms in Western New York run a little wilder in parts. There is a lot of meadow land that is untouched. It is breathtaking.

When I got to the sign that read, "Chatauqua County", I let out a "Woo-hoo!" I was getting close. My heart started to beat a little faster, I could feel it in my fingertips. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got there - a friendly reception or the usual icy stares. I drove down Rt. 60 and passed Aldrich’s Restaurant, where my grandparents used to take me for root beer floats. It had a dairy in the back, and I used to like to look at the cows. I couldn’t believe the place was still there!

I drove into the town and almost missed it. Literally, that’s how small it is. I passed our old church, which looked tiny compared to the cathedral it was when I was five. I passed the White Horse Inn, which I always thought was swanky as a child (I must not have noticed the neon "Labatt’s Blue" sign in the window). And I passed the little beauty shop which hasn’t changed a bit, and suddenly there was the light, the one light, but nothing looked the same, and I turned left to go to my old house. Which pretty much meant I turned left and then drove 30 feet and parked.

We lived in an 18th-century farmhouse. It still looked the same, except someone had added onto the barn in the back. Excuse me, toolshed. When I was five it looked as big as a barn. In fact, I was bragging to a friend just last week that my family had a huge barn when I was little. Well, upon seeing it again I realized that the only thing in common with a barn this thing had is that it is painted red. And now it has some funky addition on the side made out of plywood and plastic tarp.

I parked and tried to swallow my tears of excitement. Literally, I have been waiting for this day for years - going to see the old house. I couldn’t see much from the street so even parked I didn’t know what to expect, except someone to be home, since there were 3 SUV’s in the drive.

Well, unfortunately, it was a sorry sight. The front door was open behind the screen door as I made my way up the front walk and onto the gingerbread porch. The paint has worn away from the wooden planks. Grungy wicker furniture clogs the whole thing now, as gray as the house itself. . The boards are splintered in places. This was the same porch my parents had painstakingly sanded and painted so David and I, and the other kids in the neighborhood, could run barefoot without a care. We learned to walk on that porch.

An older woman approached the door before I could get close enough to knock. She watched me through the screen as I took the last few steps up onto the porch and there she stayed the whole time, not asking me in or even joining me on the porch. No. She made me stand out there like I was some backwoods door-to-door salesman as I explained why I was there and how much it meant to me to see the house again. And then she said, "Well, that’s nice. Now if you’ll excuse me," and closed the front door.

I stood there for a second, not knowing what to make of what just happened. I didn’t even notice a hot tear run down my cheek until it hit my finger. I had half a mind to knock again and say, "Look, lady! A person sharing my DNA was birthed on the upstairs bathroom floor (my brother, and he really was!) and that gives me a hell of a lot more ownership of this house than you, so let me the f*ck in so I can go see my damn room!" But I didn’t. I just got back in the car and wiped my face.

I decided to take a drive to Grandma’s Kitchen, a tiny restaurant where my family ate a lot. Friday fish frys (not fries!) were a big thing. Turns out it had moved a few blocks east, so it took me a long time to find. I went to my old school and popped into my old kindergarten classroom, but my teacher, Mrs. Price, had left for the day. Still, everything was the exact same. She hasn’t rearranged the room at all. There was the learning circle area, the toy area, and the water fountain where David let me kiss him on the cheek and I got in trouble. I took a seat in a tiny chair and wrote her a note.

At the grocery store, which was called "Super Duper" in my day but is now "Shur-Fine", I scanned the bulletin board for job postings and wrote a babysitter-needed number on my hand. I bought a cheesy Cassadaga souvenir t-shirt. I am not a cheesy souvenir t-shirt person... except when I am in my hometown.

"Hometown" is a funny word. It’s odd when you have a hometown you remember that doesn’t remember you.