You can never go home again…

Just the other day, for some strange reason, I decided to view my childhood town on a satellite map. I had been thinking about that creepy old dead tree that once loomed over the woods behind the house across the street from me. The tree fell in a windstorm over forty years ago, so it is long gone. But I wondered if perhaps the wooded area where it stood was still there. The last time I got a bird’s eye view of my old neighborhood I noticed that quite a lot had changed, and the area was a lot more built up since I had left in 1986. So I looked last night, and to my surprise, the tree’s final forested resting place remains undisturbed, while not far from it the landscape had changed to the point of being barely recognizable. Then I looked down upon my grandparents’ home, which was in walking distance from my old house. The area around it was even more alien, with once wooded areas bisected by new roads and new developments. I wouldn’t say the town was totally rural when I was a child, but it was nothing like the sprawling urban area it has now become. So many of the places where my friends and I played when we were kids have been obliterated, scoured from the land as if they had never even existed.

I obtained some comfort from the fact that my childhood home seemed to be fairly well kept and cared for. Most of the court I once lived on wasn’t too different looking than when I last saw it. But my grandparents’ home was another story. It wasn’t a slum, but it had fallen far from the way my grandfather had kept it when he was alive. The land upon which the house sits, which was once part of a large wooded area, is now stranded between the main road and a new street behind it. When I was a kid, somewhere back behind that house was a small creek. Yet I couldn’t even find it at all on the satellite map. This entire area was just a small town with a town hall, a couple of churches, and an elementary school that I attended. I could walk, or bike, from my house to my grandparents’ home, or go the other way on the main road and visit either of my great aunts. If I went further past their homes, I could visit the gas station owned by my cousin.

Another thing I noticed when looking at that map was the proximity of my old home to the infamous Key Bridge. Where is live now is about 45 miles from the location of the metal monster, or, rather, what’s left of it. However, the house in which I grew up is only 16 miles from the monster. It’s a wonder I never had the occasion to accidentally cross it then, considering how close I was to it. Perhaps the only thing that prevented that from happening is I only had gotten my driver’s license about a year before we moved away. I hadn’t yet had the occasion (or parental permission) to do much driving beyond my own neighborhood. When my family moved into that house I was six years old, and so it would still have been a year before the Key Bridge was completed in 1977. The creepy old tree across the street was on the verge of falling, but that iron monster a few miles away was rising… Stranger is the fact that the hospital in which I was born is within sight of Baltimore’s harbor monster. However, the Key Bridge had yet to exist on that day, and it was still only in the planning stages. If it had existed then, my mom could have looked out her hospital room window and gazed upon it.

But now all I have of this past are old photographs; of my childhood home, my grandparents’ home, and even a few pictures of the creek. The houses are still there, in somewhat modified form, but the neighborhood where I started out in life is essentially no more. And of course, the sinister steel sentinel of the Patapsco River is also gone, living only in videos and images. These memories of the past only exist in the confines of my mind, and in the minds of my mom, my surviving uncle, and some of my cousins. You can only return to the place, but not to the time. That old saying I believe is indeed true – you really can never go home again.