It never fails. I settle in here and begin to feel restless. I think about the changes that have occurred, and what hasn’t. Mostly I think about my life in relation to this place. How much it has changed, how I have become comfortable with where I am. I mean that both in the sense of my life in general, and with the person I used to be, someone so far away from me now. But coming back here, I look for clues. I think of all the people who are usually so caught up in their lives that they don’t have any interest in it. The past is gone. To me, it is a relic, and I become a time traveler in my memories: I used to go here. I saw this there. I worked in that building. There’s nothing that interesting about it, really. It’s the passage of time. But just as I like to return to a place I travelled to years ago, I’m curious to see it again. As if it is like visiting an old friend.
This place being my home, Michigan, where I visited last week.
I had a reckoning as we stopped in the Mission on the drive home from SFO: it’s best to acknowledge that things change. There is no stability. Maybe, you find the stability within yourself, or you have to, to do the work that makes you tick. You can’t rely on old systems that have been in place seemingly forever. When someone asks what I think about a legacy, I respond with: The only glory is in this life. Some of those dreams are never going to materialize or they are going to transform into something hopefully better, more unexpected, a kind of contentment, perhaps. But after I’m gone, I won’t be thinking about who remembers me. (Of course, at the least I want my daughter to.) But whatever dreams I had of fame and glory from writing have mostly been subsumed into maintaining the joy in the practice. I’ve had my share of struggling over the years, and maybe that was necessary to get to this point.
To repurpose a phrase from Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, “Change, for the lack of a better word, is good.”
The world changes, and you have to change and evolve with it. Or separate yourself from it. I’ve usually found ways to manage this.
Though how to explain my disappointment to return each year to those memory haunted reliquaries of youth? I go there almost expecting it to be what it once was, though I know it’s not going to be. Sometimes, it’s just to live a moment again in a time that was so dynamic in forming my identity, though it was also an exceedingly fraught time (I was in my twenties). I think this is why it is good to move on from such a place. Even if you think you can return to try to touch it again, usually, you can’t.
And this can happen with people. Like many folks I suspect, I reconnected with some old friends during the pandemic. I know they were still around in the old places (Ann Arbor, Detroit) and I looked them up. It was both good and a bit of a shock. To realize they may still see the old me who has in fact changed markedly over the decades. And that their lives have gone on with their own struggles and disappointments. Most have prevailed in their own ways. We never see the hopes and dreams of others; we just witness the residual day to day struggles. Or whatever part they are comfortable sharing. But maybe whatever vestige tied you to them is still there—or not. It’s almost like it’s okay to make the effort (I think of a line from a Jim Harrison poem that I once used as a novel epigraph: “We are each the only world we are going to get.”)
There is often a fear that I won’t relate to these people at all, and the place will leave me cold. That too, has happened. But what am I looking for? What do I expect to find?
I don’t return to Michigan every year, though for a string of years I might. I feel a bit less constrained by my family in the way I did when I was just starting out on my own and seemed to need to return there for some kind of reality grounding. Now, I see it as a duty to bring my daughter around, and everyone there is happy to see her. (Or us, I never really know.) But my attachment to the place can feel distinct, a sociological experiment, a curiosity. I’m not that surprised by the old stomping grounds.
But it hit me coming back home to the Bay Area. For what felt like the first time, I actually submitted to this change, by acknowledging it when I stopped to get lunch in my old neighborhood, the Mission. I was sitting inside the immaculate white makeover of a restaurant facing the wall of what had once been, twenty years earlier, the dark, garishly lit bar of the previous restaurant that had been in this space, La Rondalla. This was once an institution that had always been and seemed as if it was forever always going to be a fixture in my old neighborhood. But that establishment had already been gone for a decade already, for as long as I’ve been away from there, and I hadn’t given it a second thought. Everything changes. But not just that, how everything changes.