The Way Back Home

Each year in Ashland, Oregon, as the day’s length begins to grow usefully longer and the purple Dreck grows thick on the hills, the town is treated to a tender self-indulgence. Seniors from Ashland High School, wrapped in red and white march in procession and take their places in the park’s band shell to be honored by their community and graduate into adulthood (or whatever).

To be honest, I remember the practice on the morning of my graduation better than the ceremony it rehearsed. We walked, two by two, over the road and down the path, through the administrators, idle onlookers, and rows of empty chairs to the stage and were seated – a great mass of nerves, and hope, and potential, and hangover, and innocence.

By evening we had scrubbed and slept and scrubbed again, donned our gowns and caps, and gathered once more in the park called Lithia -- called so for the lithium-rich water piped in from out of town to the mineral-stained drinking fountains therein. At the time I took it for granted, and, perhaps, still do, that we walked in the front of the line. Connor and I had been close for better than half our lives by that time, and it seemed fitting to me for us to lead our peers to whatever comes after high school.  Pompous and childishly arrogant as I was then, I still feel a sense of pride to think of it.

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Last night in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I currently live, the seniors of Yellow Springs High School graduated. I know this because of the accounts I have been hearing all day from coworkers about the jubilance of town – the smiling kids everywhere and the proud parents. I don’t know their traditions here in Yellow Springs, but I’m sure they have them and that many of the characters in their story are akin to those in ours.

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Hearing about the prospect of graduation I looked at the sun-laden deciduous trees casting shade outside the window of my office. I remember those first days after high school and the sense of relief and joy and pride that I felt. Recalling that time, only five years ago, I am caught by a bittersweet longing to return to those days. The clichés adults have been repeating around me my whole life seem to be more dully true each day. Perhaps youth is the ability to believe, stolidly and brazenly and stubbornly, that this reality will never apply to you.

Not that I am unhappy with my life today. Over the past five years I have traveled countless roads and met many found and lost souls. I have made friends and enemies and lost touch with most of them. I finally broke a bone and thought seriously about the possibility of God. I fell into the jaws of love and was gnawed on, choked on, and spit out to the dust of a New Mexican road. I have also broken hearts. I’ve written songs and won elections and gone mudding in a four-by-four pickup truck. All these jewels of memory collected in my jewel-box mind.

Yet, still, there is some tug, some longing, for a return to those days. I tried once, to return, only to find that the image in my mind’s eye more brilliant than that perception of my optic nerve, and I ran back to Ohio. To the snow and strip malls and my old bitterness. I’m growing here, for now, and the bitterness is fading.

In a song I wrote called The Way Back Home, the chorus lyrics read, “All this time, and all these roads, well, it gets harder and harder to know, the way back home.” Now that I have tried, and failed, to find the home of my cryogenically perfect memory, I find that I spend more time thinking about the lyrics that come in the end of that same song, “It takes a little time to come back down, ‘cause I been young, and I been proud. And I seen the East, and I seen the West, I seen enough to know I aint seen it all yet.”