"You can never go back....
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posted Mon, 07/26/10
I spent last week training in washington, DC. For those of you who are unaware of the fact, I grew up in a suburb of DC. I did not have a charmed life as a child, but it was in some ways, a magical time. I managed to fall in with a truly unique group of friends, and we managed to help each other through the travails and misfortunes that mark the early times after latency. We stuck together through thick and thin really from elementary school until we graduated from high school. I can still distinctly remember a high school guidance counselor saying that after high school we would be lucky if we hung onto more than one or two of our closest friends for more than a few years.
Well, in our case, that guidance counselor was wrong. We have managed to stay in touch and visit each other occasionally for the last fifteen years, and I see no sign of that stopping. We have gone through marriages and births, through graduations and promotions.
So, I went back to my old haunts at the end of this trip looking for a connection to the old stomping grounds, where as a teenager, we thought we would live forever and face down the world.
I went from location to location that had held so much meaning to me. I went to my old high school, drove past my childhood home, cruised our favorite hangouts, and tried to feel that bond to those places. It wasn't there. As I drove around, i was reminded of how much I had forgotten. How the roads were laid out, where places were. New building had sprung up, and old ones had built up. The lone vegetable stand had become a shop, which had become a strip mall, which had evolved into a shopping center, which I couldn't now find a parking space for. So much had grown up and gone away in my absence.
And so had I.
The last place I drove to was the recruiter's office. The Marine recruiter was not in, and I was a little disappointed, but not surprised about. Even when I enlisted, half my lifetime ago, they were usually out visiting high schools or doing other community activities on fridays. It is unfortunate, because I wanted to tell them something. I wanted to hand them my impressive looking business card, show them pictures of my beautiful wife and adorable child. I wanted to tell them about all of the exciting things I had accomplished, the places I had gone, and the adventures I had had. This was so that they could tell these young teenagers that of all of these things which I had and had done, none of them could have happened if I had not come to this unremarkable cubicle in a non-descript office park first.
So much from such humble and inauspicious beginnings.
Yet here I am, and there I was. as I looked back upon the building from my car, I thought about how when I left that same parking lot 17 years ago, almost to the day, I was not being hauled off, but released into the world at large.
So I drove off, and barely noticed the scenery that I drove past for perhaps the last time as I was looking forward to dinner with one of my old friends who had stayed in the area. That night I was going to meet up with another who worked on Capitol hill and see if I could drink him under the table (he didn't even try to keep up).
My old haunts are now alien to me, as thought I only knew them because of how they were described to me by somebody else who knew them. It is bittersweet in that as much as I miss that magical time, it had to fall to the wayside, it had to go away from me so that I could have a clear path to where I am now.
In 1993, I was a 17 year old on a bus leaving a hometown which held all the friends I held most dear to me (and still do) and headed towards an infamous swamp of an island run by the most fearsome men of history, known for only two things; the trials it inflicted and the men that survived. It was my first time out on my own, and I was apprehensive about the future. I did not know where the road would take me, but I felt an eerie calm. Somehow, I knew that I was supposed to be in *that* seat. I was supposed to be on *that* bus. I was supposed to be driving down *that* road. I just did not know where it would lead anymore than in a strictly geographic sense.
I can never go back down that road I came 17 years ago. I can never go back to a time before that.
But I can go forward. I can go to the house of an old friend, and we can talk about our children, and we can split some beers and we can wonder whether they will have the kinds of friends that we are to each other."
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