written out

9.17.08

...excerpt from my journal...

I just finished reading Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley”. The book nourished my desire to be out on the road again. It also had a part where Steinbeck visited where he had grown up and he talked about the incongruence of memory and reality. His writing told of a fear that I know I harbor. It’s hard to give that fear a name, but perhaps I could call it change; I mean the change that father time slowly brings. So subtle you can’t see it but when you look back it’s almost unrecognizable and you become a ghost in what you thought would be recognizable reality.

“My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance—and I wanted to go for the same reason. Tom Wolfe was right ‘you can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.’”

Sometimes it’s the slow change that is the most painful. A married couple who once shared such passion now go to sleep like two brothers on a hotel bed. A best friend who gradually becomes a stranger, and not because of any falling out but simply because time has slowly eroded the friendship into something unrecognizable. If Steinbeck and Wolfe are right, I fear my homecoming after two years in Africa. My idea of what home is brings me comfort while I’m away. But my idea of home is frozen in time, unchanging while the reality of home changes with each passing day. I’m being written out of its history.