You Can Go Home Again

Home is not a place. It is memories.

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

They say you can’t go home again. I think that is so, but maybe I can take it with me. Isn’t that what memories are? Isn’t that where home really is? We keep home packed neatly and carefully inside our mind, leaving behind the things we no longer need or want, and retaining those that sustain us.

I was a young girl, once.  I am still that young girl inside, at heart. But now there is so much more. I remember Philadelphia so well. I smile now, just thinking about it. It’s not really like that anymore, but the memory of it is more real to me than, well, the reality. The family home has been sold. I drove past it once, a while back. If anything, the home, the neighborhood are nicer that when we lived there.  But it no longer resonates with me.   Just another neighborhood.  Still, I sometimes think to myself; this is no longer home to me, but it is to somebody. The last time I went there, I just sat in my car and watched.  The kids play different games than we did. I saw them play and wasn’t sure what the game was. It was different than what I knew. But they were playing, arguing, doing all the things we did, but differently. I stayed longer than I intended, felt drawn in, yet isolated, not part of it anymore.  People here are building their own memories, and it makes me feel warm. But this is now someone else’s home., someone else’s memory.

My friends are scattered to the wind, but I see some of them, once in a while, here and there. But home is safe and complete, in my memories, and my friends all stay there with me.

Philadelphia was so big and so small at the same time. As a child, Philly was just the few blocks near home.  It’s all I really knew, but it was more than enough. School, the playground, even a movie theater.  And friends everywhere. When one of my parents drove me into the Center City it was like visiting a foreign country, so different from my own neighborhood. The people truly seemed like foreigners. We ate at a restaurant that we had never been to before. They treated us cordially, not family, like they did in the restaurants back home. Even as a young child I had a sense of we are just visitors here, this is not home. I had to mature a little before I could comprehend that we lived in a suburb of Philly, and not the other way around.

But that changes with age. I know a bit of how Christopher Columbus might have felt.  When I became a teenager, my parents got me a car.  With my friends, we explored the other side of the world, Center City.  Sure, there were already inhabitants, but it was ours now!  We claimed it. Sure, that’s a bit arrogant, but as seventeen-year-olds, we needed something that we could claim for ourselves; something that wasn’t curated by our parents. We found our own favorite places to go, to be, apart from our parents. We became part of it, not just guests.  Being a guest sounds nice, but I’d rather be part of things, fully involved. I remember, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane singing, “Your friends, your friends; they treat you like a guest!”. They were playing that song in our new favorite restaurant, and the staff knew our names.  And I thought, I don’t want to be anybody’s guest. Perhaps that was a premonition.

The buildings in Center City were quite different from in my neighborhood.  They were older, much older. They showed their age but, not unlike an old grandma, they became all the more deeply beautiful with age. I’m sure my youth had something to do with it, but I fell in love with the Center City. I fell in love with the architecture.  Who designed these buildings?  What had they lived through? Somehow I felt I was part of their heritage, and I wanted to know them better.

No surprise then, that when it came time to find a college, I chose Moore College of Art and Design in the Center City. I could have commuted from home, but I wanted to be my own person, independent of my parents.  Who doesn’t, at that age!  I moved far enough away to have my own life, but still close enough, still in Philly, to be able to lean on my parents for support.  And to use their washer and dryer! I sold my car, as it was impractical in the Center City.  Doing that made me feel even more a part of the community.  I wasn’t driving through it; I was PART of it! I still feel the vibrancy of that time in my life, of friends, old and new, discovering the world beyond our childhood.

It's been so many years, now.  Which one was my home?  That place in the suburbs?  The place in Center City? My apartment was a second floor walk-up in a very old building.

Some would have declined to live there, but it was magic to me.  Old, worn floors, misfitted doors that didn’t all latch properly, archaic electrical fixtures, all made me feel connected to the past.  I felt the presence of all who had gone before me. And as a bonus, the apartment was near to where my favorite architect, Lou Kahn had lived.  His widow still lived there! So, was this home?  Or was it the suburb I grew up in?  In memory now, they are somehow combined, neither one complete without the other.

My husband and I met in the Center City.  He was also an architecture student. As we discovered each other, we also explored the city, strolled the streets; because we loved exploring, and because we couldn’t afford to do much else.

I’d had some boyfriends, but I knew early on that Jim and I would be life-long. I still don’t entirely get it.  Sure, we had much in common, but there were other guys that I had things in common with, maybe more. But somehow, you know.

We made very little money, but two can live as cheaply as one, or so they say. In my fourth year, I got a stipend as a teaching assistant. I remember my first class, intro to architectural design.  I felt odd, entering the classroom and walking to the teacher’s desk instead of a student desk.  I felt like a bit of a fraud.  I was great at being a student, but what did I know of teaching? I caught on, after a while, but teaching was not my calling.

Jim did basic drawing for an architecture firm.  This was when Auto Cad was a new thing, the first drawing software that any of us had ever seen.  Being young, he caught on more quickly than his superiors. That helped him advance in the firm. I look back at Auto Cad now and it seems like it was from the time of dinosaurs! It’s strange, I think.  Some of the best architecture in this city was designed with paper and pencil. Software allows for radical departures in design, but that doesn’t automatically make it better.

Anyway, we had just enough (with family help) to buy a tiny row house near the Italian Market. I look back now at how young and presumptuous we were.  But that’s how it’s supposed to be. Caution is for us old folks. We put a skylight in the house, which taught us the difference between how things work in theory, and how they are in reality. Even with what we thought we knew, every part of the project was new, thrilling, intimidating, exciting and, ultimately, rewarding.  All the architecture classes in the world can’t teach you what you need to know to actually build something. We discovered tools we’d never heard of; we discovered that it matters what sequence you follow.  Plan ahead! The two of us working together probably took twice as long as one skilled tradesman would have taken. But we did it.  That’s the important thing.  We saw it through.  Together. That boded well for our future.  And we get along with builders much better these days, because we know what they go through!

We got married. Jim saw no need.  We already lived together, so what would a wedding add to it? I guess women know better. It wasn’t about the legal aspects, but I wanted to gather our families together and truly join together completely, in body and in spirit.  It matters, I know, not just to know yourself as a couple, but to make sure everyone else knows.  It matters to pronounce it in front of everyone in your life who matters. These days, I think that might be passe, and that’s a shame.

We had joined the First Unitarian Church, built in 1886 by native son Frank Furness.

It’s not just that it’s a church; it’s a testament to the heights that the human mind can achieve in design.  I have to admit, sometimes my mind strayed from the sermon as I contemplated the design, the awesome beauty, and the construction of this building.  I think God forgives me my inattention to the sermon.  I think maybe, sometimes, God was admiring right along with me. God already knew the sermon, so what the heck!

But we chose to get married at the Fleisher Art Center. I took classes there. The building is more contemporary than First Unitarian.  I’ve always liked the contrast.

Perhaps we were too young to know better, too inexperienced to accurately assess what we were taking on. And perhaps that’s for the best.  We were taking classes, working jobs, and studying like mad for our architecture licensing exam. I couldn’t do that now to save my life.  But we could do it then. 

We took the exams in the basement of the armory. I remember thinking, all this studying of fine architecture, only to take the exam in an old, featureless basement! I looked around and saw the code violations and the outdated construction techniques.  And here we were taking our licensing exam.  More than just a little ironic! The exam took four solid ten hour days, with hundreds of other hopefuls participating. I remember, it was the same week as the Tiananmen Square massacre.  They were students, too. That stays with me to this day.  Why couldn’t they have lives focused on positive enterprises, instead of fighting for freedom, and losing? To this day, I never forget the contrasts. I remember that, as we try to make our own lives, many never get the opportunity. Don’t waste those opportunities, never take them for granted.

It was several months later that I came home from teaching, and there were two letters in our mail. One for each of us, from the architectural certification board. Jim wasn’t home yet, and I didn’t want to open them until he got there. But that didn’t keep me from examining the envelopes to try to determine whether it was good news or bad.  What if one of us passed, and the other didn’t? I had never before considered that possibility. With a strange dread I examined the two envelopes. Would they still have identical envelopes, even if one of us passed and one did not? But the envelopes were inscrutable.

I waited impatiently for Jim to get home.  He wasn’t even all the way in the door when I rushed him and waived his envelope in his face. We opened them together, slowly, in almost deliberate unison. We looked, and we both smiled at each other.  We made it!   We were both architects! We went out to dinner that night and spent money we couldn’t afford.  Money well spent.

Oh, but it’s just memory, now. Surely, we couldn’t live that joy forever. We were professionals now. Not interns.  Not wannabes. Professional architects. And it was time to move on.  It turns out that Philly wasn’t big enough for both of us.  We couldn’t both get the positions we wanted there, and found ourselves packed up and moving to Baltimore. I remember that day so well. Leaving our neighborhood, our little row house which now displayed a for sale sign, driving down the street, trailer in tow, wanting to think I would be back, but doubting that I would.  No, you can’t go home, but you can pack up your memories and take them with you.

And now, thirty years later, Baltimore is about to become a memory. Life, they say, is what happens while you are busy making plans. We took our jobs in Baltimore all those years ago. But each of us left them for better positions, and then left those for still better positions.  I look back.  Did we foresee any of this?  Not exactly, but we still had some sense of direction. 

We lost all four of our parents in that time.  But we had made grandparents of them.  We had one kid, a son.  Well, I guess we must call him an adult now. He reminds me of Jim and me, when we were there, in Center City, sure that we had it all under control, really knowing so little.  Ignorance is bliss.  We made it work. He will make it work.

And the friends we’ve made. Some are so ‘normal’, so much like us.  But some are polar opposites.  We argue, but we love the arguing. I know myself better, for better or worse, from arguing with them. And the church.  The ‘new’ church that now seems old. Joining that church led to some of those arguments. We are all better for it.

But we must move on. Baltimore is about to be a memory.

I think of things that happened decades ago, and could swear that it was just last year. We are the old folks now.  We are the ones who reminisce more than we experience.  We are the ones who have no worlds left to conquer, and not enough energy to do it anyway! We are the keepers of the past.  They say you can’t go home.  But I do it every day.

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Thank you, Ben, for making Same Walk, Different Shoes a Reality