Highland Park Mirror

A Homer's Odyssey
Looks like Thomas Wolfe was right

The winter has always been a time for homecomings. Students come home from college, flushed with stories of independence and discovery; the children who have grown up and moved to that place we know as 'AWAY' come back to hang ornaments on the tree, and light candles in the window. Over the past few years I have done my share of wandering about the country, going to school in Boston and various periods of employment that have taken me from Des Moines, to Albany and down to West Palm Beach, plus other shorter trips in between.

Through each bout of wanderlust I could always look forward to a rewarding and poignant homecoming. The anticipation would start building in me somewhere on the Turnpike, and come to an emotional head as I berthed my car safely in its familiar spot by the old honeysuckle bushes.

However, I have no new adventures planned anytime soon and no new wanderings coming up in the foreseeable future. And so, with my last emotional homecoming now several months behind me, I am able to look at Highland Park as she really is. That is, without the rosy haze of relief that comes at the end of the long road home to obscure my view.

It is nighttime again, and I have once again trodden that same sad path from Dunkin' Donuts to my house. I have walked this path more times than I could imagine counting, starting almost a decade ago when my friends and I would congregate outside Dunkin' Donuts to drink Snapple and eat coffee rolls before hustling home to make our 10pm curfews.

Many of the old faces that still pass through those doors have changed (indeed the doors themselves have moved), and many of the new faces cannot reasonably be called new anymore.

So too, has that all too familiar walk home changed. The walk home from Dunkin' Donuts always seemed to be an unchanging experience throughout my growing-up. It was like having an old friend, a childhood companion with me on the walk as I ticked off every landmark on the way between the cold night and my warm bed. But if walking home through Highland Park is an old friend, it seems that this old friend and I have lost touch in a terminal way.

It is as if this friend -- whom I remember sporting a Mohawk and a cigarette, or covered in mud and rain from Frisbee game -- has appeared before me looking clean-cut and professional (two things I have vowed never to let myself become). We smile and talk about the old times, rehash everything we did together before we drifted apart.

The conversation is pleasant, slightly awkward, and very telling. It is apparent that much of what my friend Highland Park and I had in common has been lost to the passage of time. Sadly, it is only through our mutual connection to that past that we can communicate. And once that is gone there will be nothing.

In my absence Highland Park has taken up the banner of 'a revitalized downtown.' It dances after the Pied Piper of Progress down a road fueled by the horrors of granola-fueled suburban mediocrity. I would never be able to join this parade, because I could never divorce myself from all those tender memories of my childhood.

It was a childhood that did not need silly festivals or low-sodium/high-fiber boutiques to fall in love with Highland Park. The Highland Park of my memory was soft and warm and dull as shit. It was that dullness that fostered the adventures and relationships the likes of which can only be conceived of by a gang of friends growing up in a small town with nothing to do.

But that is how it exists only in my memory, heavily colored, no doubt by my sense of nostalgia. Nostalgia does not hold up against the harsh light of reality nor against the future (you can ask the former owners of Neil's Novelty Emporium, I'm sure they will agree with me). I cannot expect Highland Park to stay they way I remember it anymore than I can expect my old friend to keep his Mohawk and stay 16 for the rest of his life.

The sad truth is that as much Highland Park has changed, so have I. I wonder, sometimes, if the 17 year old track captain who used to sit in the parking lot of Dunkin Donuts would even recognize me, or if I would recognize him if we were to cross paths.

There are certain relationships that were too perfect to survive anywhere other than carefully tucked away in sepia-tinged memories. Highland Park and I have such a relationship. My town grows newer and stranger to me by the week, with each store closing like a friend moving away and each new change is an unwelcome replacement. It seems, sadly, that the only way to keep Highland Park the way it was when I first learned to love it, is to join the ranks of people my age who have repatriated themselves in the land known as 'Away', and leave this strange new town that has formed around me to the people who have created it.