Mama, Mama I'm comin' home

Tomorrow night I’ll take a flight back home to where I spent my youth. It’s a town that calls itself a city due to its bloated population in the 1940s or earlier when it applied for a city charter. It only makes the mainstream news for some quirky oddity or for some things more radical that have smeared its name in the polarizing acts of its mayor, who, seeking political notoriety, and despite decades of decline caused by everything from the post-industrial exodus of jobs to bad luck and extremely poor management and foresight, chose to blame illegal immigrants for causing all of the local issues of lack of funding, lack of jobs, an incapability to retain most of it’s college educated youth, crime, and drug traffic (which, I might add, had been in existence there since the 70’s at least).

I knew since I was young I couldn’t stay there. Streets I roamed as a kid into the late hours of the night are now places where, partly due to fear mongering, I need to keep scanning with a watchful eye. It’s unfortunate, but change is always inevitable. I grew up among people who thought that things in my town shouldn’t have changed since mid century, and indeed many things didn’t – I cherish many of them. The joke was that our town was a great place to be when the world came to an end, since everything always arrived or happened there twenty-thirty years late.

Arriving into the time warp is evident even on the drive into town on 2 lane “highways,” where the absence of Los Angeles freeways does nothing short of delight my eyes. I’m lucky enough to go to visit a dozen or two older relatives, many now octogenarians and children of the Depression era. My grandmother is 80, and still cooks twice a week for family dinners. In a rare act among other locals her age, she recently took up Tai Chi. Some things do change.

She’ll sit us down and have to be told that we can get our own drinks, that she needn’t need to serve us. The kitchen is always warm, the warmth that comes from over 4 decades of use and bringing family together around her table. Time and again I’ll sneak back to where she keeps the family photo albums to hear stories about people I can barely remember, and some that I’m not able to stop inquiring about.

Her husband of 50 years died 6 years ago this Sunday. Besides being the man who gave the inspiration for the name of this blog, he was one of my biggest role models. Much as he has become mythologized in my mind over the past 6 years, coming to see his humanity has brought me to understand and appreciate his example even more. Abandoned by his parents, raised by his immigrant grandparents, working from the bottom to VP of his company. The night before he died, he asked my great uncle -- his brother-in-law – what he thought about a person’s chances in the afterlife. When he took his second heart attack, we shook hands with those who dropped by the funeral home to offer their condolences through a line down the block for two and a half hours straight. I’m inclined to think that what caused that was quite a special, genuine magnanimity, and a selflessness that he shared with my grandmother and their children, as well as many of those I’m lucky to call family.

The town I grew up in is now more a narrative about the past, but I'll visit what's left, and everyone who remembers it. "And so it goes, and so it goes, and as the Book says, 'We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.'"