Rusty Saber: You can't go home again, except in memories

Joe McAdoo, former chairman of the communication department at Drury University, is on vacation, basking on the beaches in Hawaii. The following column is reprinted from SBJ archives.

Conventional wisdom tells us that you can't go home again and there is more truth to this than most would admit.

Home is the place that exists in the mysterious little box in the back of the brain where memories are stored. Home, and the people we associate with it, exist in our memories. Time, the great ravager, refuses to stand still. When you go home, it isn't there anymore, and neither are the people.

Years ago, my wife and I decided to plant our roots in the Ozarks. Springfield is our home; it is where we live and work. We have raised our children here. I, for one, love Springfield, and would never consider living elsewhere. However, when I hear or think of home, my memory bank brings up images of a small (in comparison to Springfield) town in Kansas the town where I grew up.

I know that you can't go home again, but I go to that place from time to time. Some parts of my hometown are the same as I remember them. Some of the same stores are still doing business at the same locations. But different people are running them, or they are being run by people that I barely recognize. Time has changed them, just as it has changed me.

Back in the "good old days," there were three movie houses in my hometown. I spent my Saturday afternoons in these places of fantasy. There were double features, cartoon serials and previews of next week's double features. All three theaters are gone, victims of progress, television and changing lifestyles. What do kids there now do on Saturday afternoons?

I vividly remember when they widened the two main streets in town. Afterwards, those streets seemed to be the grandest streets I had ever seen. Now, they are barely adequate to handle four-lane traffic. How could they possibly have grown so small?

The houses I remember as grand mansions I couldn't imagine people actually lived in these lovely homes now seem to me to be so much smaller. One of the two houses I grew up in has been torn down to make way for an apartment building. The other is still home to someone, but appears so small. How did we all fit into that tiny house?

The buildings where I went to grade school and junior high school are vacant lots. The high-school, where I made the sometimes painful, sometimes jubilant, journey through adolescence into manhood, is now a junior high school. The new high school stands in what I remember as a wheat field in the country.

The teen-age hangouts of my youth are no longer. I am sure that today's kids hang out someplace, but I don't know where.

The people who shared my growing up years have scattered to the four winds. I'm certain time has changed most of them into people that I wouldn't even know. Yet, in my memory bank, they are forever frozen in time and space. They are eternally 18. There are some things time cannot change because I will not allow it to change.

No, you can't go home again. Home is where the memories of yesterday are, and they are very special. They are the foundations upon which our todays are built. I am certain that "my" town and these people have had a profound effect upon me, and who I am.

My heart is in Springfield, but a little piece of my soul is hidden back there in a small Kansas town, it is "home." Time, progress, modern technology nothing will ever change that.