Yellowriter

It was the writer, Thomas Wolfe, who said “you can never go home again” and I recently had that play out during an excursion to California.  David, our twenty-two year old son in the Navy is in Spain and his car, a Mazda 3, was parked in the garage of my dad’s girlfriend.  Mary, that’s my father’s young chick (she’s seventy-five) has recently put her house up for sale so the car needed to be moved.  David’s solution was for dad to fly down to Burbank and drive the phantom blue blur up the coast.  I can tell you that twelve hundred plus miles driving alone on mostly interstate is dull at best.  The good news is that the car is safe and sound in our garage in Port Angeles, Washington.  The bad news is that I found that Thomas Wolfe was a prophet indeed.

I was born and raised in the small town of Lancaster, California.  It is in Los Angeles County, but barely.  The landscape begins to shift as one travels north out of Valencia and Santa Clarita.  The desert starts to take over.  That would be the Mojave Desert and she can be one mean momma!  Hot as Hades in the summer and sub-zero in the winter, the area known as the Antelope Valley can be a tough place.  Growing up there was great though.  No video games for me and my pals.  We spent our days playing Over-the-Line, which is a scaled down baseball game, for hours on end.  We played in three digit heat and no one carried a water bottle.  Don’t ask - there wasn’t bottled water for sale yet, the stone age.  Actually it was about 1970.  I remember because we were all still pretty sore at the Baltimore Orioles for getting beat by the lowly, yet amazing, Mets.  We named a stenchy mud hole after Baltimore, dubbing it “the Oriole Hole.”  The kangeroo court could dole out a penalty and make a person get on all fours and thus have to smell the hole for five minutes.  Martin Stewart was the only guy with a watch so we all wanted to be on his good side.  He could add a couple of minutes to the sentence and nobody would be the wiser.

Junior High was painful, but High School was fun.  Antelope Valley Highs’ class of 1976 was awesome to say the least.  Jim Wagner was our Senior Class President and all of our reunuions to date have been exceptional.  Collen Hall helped out with the thirty-year and she could still shake and bake at age forty-eight!  Let’s face it - we just got old!  But the alternative isn’t so super.  You either get older or you get deader!  Friends I’ve lost include Donald King, Robert Louis Brown, Judith Pipkin and Dale Snyder (who died in a mountain climbing accident).  I thought about these people as I drove down Avenue I in Lancaster last week.

It is disheartening to me that when Hollywood makes a Mad Max end-of-the -world movie it is almost always filmed in the Antelope Valley.  Resident Evil and the Book of Eli show the desolate land for what it is.  Avenue I is a b-grade apocalypse film set, with about forty percent of the buildings from my youth, not only condemned, but demolished and removed.  If that part of Lan-scatter (affectionate term) were a mouth, most of the teeth would be missing.  So I came to the sad conclusion that the town of my childhood had contracted metaphorical meth-mouth.

My dad stills lives in the same house I grew up in.  I was nine months old in March, 1959 when we moved in.  I slept on the floor of my old bedroom.  It was humbling as I stared at the curtains my mom put up in 1972.  Dad needs a decorator or a new house.  The wind howled as I lay on my blow-up-mattress bed and remembered all of the nonsense I got into.  But they were good times.  I saw two of my sisters and we laughed for hours so it wasn’t all doom and gloom.  Time had simply moved on and I have yet to accept that fact.  I tried to go home again, but all I have is memories.

As I write this in my office, I glance up at the picture of my mom, taken when she was just sixteen years old.  She was so fresh and pretty and now she has been gone lo these seven years, just like Marley in “A Christmas Carol.”  But my mother does not haunt me like Scrooge’s old partner did him.  Instead, she comforts me.  You see, my time, and yours, is coming.  Nothing stays the same, but is in constant flux.  Accept it for your own peace of mind.  Thomas told me I couldn’t go home again and he was right.  I thought that in my old town I would be a fish out of water, but that analogy is not drastic enough for what I feel tearing at my heart and soul.  I’m not a fish out of water, but instead I feel like a fish in outer space.