Home
I hardly ever go there anymore (except for the occasional visit to my parents) but today I took my car to the garage and consequently had to walk all the way through the centre of the town I grew up in to take a train to work. While I was growing up, this was my universe, this was what I knew; it's only when I went to college that I saw that the world was a lot bigger then my hometown.
But today I walked through those streets I remember so well: past the school where I learned to read but not to shut up, past the hospital where they took out my tonsils, past the home for the elderly where the grandmother who raised me doesn't remember my name or my face anymore, past the spot where they tore down the cinema I spent my sunday afternoons in, past the guitar store where I bought my first guitar, the ice cream parlor that still has the best mocha ice cream in the world, the market square where I wasted away hours in the arcades playing Donkey Kong.
All those streets and places, still somewhat familiar, yet all profoundly changed by the implacable march of time. Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right after all.
