Homecoming

At NIA, we dance to "Going Home," the first track on  Cohen's album, Old Ideas:

Going home
Without my burden
Going home
Behind the curtain
Going home
Without this costume
That I wore....

***

"Home" is at the core of human longings--a place of peace, love, and belonging.

For some, home is an imagined afterlife.  "This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through...."   Enslaved and mistreated people must hope that the next world is better than this one.

Imagine the slaves in our country who longed for their homeland. They worked back-breakingly in cotton fields, were beaten, and their babies sold to strangers. They never asked to come here; those who survived the trip arrived in the belly of ships, in chains.  Yet they sang, dreaming of home, their music the seeds of the blues.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot....Coming For to Carry Me Home....

Imagine all the men, women and children today, living in shelters and refugee camps, longing for their homeland before wars ripped them apart.  Imagine young girls sold into prostitution--by their own parents in some cultures. Imagine soldiers fighting wars in strange lands and prisoners whose incarcerations are too long and who are sometimes not even given fair trials.  Everyone longs for a place of peace and freedom.

***

Simon and Garfunkel's version of home in "Homeward Bound"---

Home where my thought's escaping,
Home where my music's playing,
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.

***

In Frost's poem, "The Death of the Hired Man," Silas says, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

***

Thomas Wolfe's novel, You Can't Go Home Again, started with a line borrowed from a writer friend, "You know, Tom, you can't go home again."

At the end, Webber says: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

***

The original Trip To Bountiful is about a woman who wants to return one last time to her hometown of Bountiful.  When she escapes her son and daughter-in-law's control and goes there, it's no longer the Bountiful of her memory.  The house is empty and dilapidated, and no one who made it home is still alive.

***

My move to San Antonio was not a choice, but a consequence of my then-husband's military assignment.  The plan was to live here four years, then return home. A thousand miles from home in Georgia, I got teary every time I heard "Georgia on my Mind."

Ten years ago, when I moved in with Mike in Georgia, I figured he was my reward for doing time in a humorless marriage.  We didn't actually plan it out; we were just having so much fun we rolled into it like we did everything else.

But Georgia, of all places?  After forty years in Texas, I finally got a chance to live there again, something I used to dream of doing.  How ironic, how perfect! I thought--seeing ahead only as far on the night road as I could see with low-beam headlights.

Suffice it to say, it wasn't what it might have been decades before.  Sandwiched between leaving and return were forty years, and my daddy--who'd often said "I'll buy you a house if you move here,"--was no longer there.  My house, writing groups,  Texas friends, and Will were all in San Antonio. My Georgia homecoming welcoming committee--except for Betty, Mike and Carlene--was absent.

In the end, I discovered for myself that I, for one, can't go home again--not Georgia, except to visit.

Georgia is the home of my childhood, beautiful kudzu, sweet tea, peach tree, red-clay, orange and gold leaves in fall Georgia. It's still a poignant and beautiful movie with a soundtrack and a cast of characters that roll over and over in my mind. But when I drove back to Texas in 2007, (after breaking up with Mike the first time), I knew for sure that San Antonio was home for the rest of this lifetime.