My father’s second wife sent me a box of photos after my dad’s death last May, a collection of pictures my mother had sent to my father some time after their divorce – family stuff, relatives, friends, places in our lives. Among them was a snapshot of me sitting alongside two of my best childhood friends, Tim and Angela Wilson. We’re sitting at a picnic table eating lunch, posing amidst cold fried chicken and homemade potato salad, smiling huge kid-smiles, swimsuits damp, hair plastered to our foreheads. I remember how deliciously bone-tired my body was at those mid-afternoon lunches; my arms drained from hours of swimming, even picking up a drumstick was akin to lifting a barbell. Those were moments of unadulterated don’t-know-anything-else-but-happiness.

     Tim and Angela lived in the next block, a five-minute walk from our gray-slate house with the pecan tree and grape arbor in the backyard. She was an elementary school classmate, a strawberry blonde tomboy with all-American looks that curled even a young boy’s toes. Tim, a couple of years older, was the good-looking athletic big brother I didn’t have. Our parents were best friends. Summers were filled with side-by-side camping trips to Lake Elkhorn, Saturday evening watermelon and badminton parties, steaks on the grill and homemade ice cream; fall and winter revolved around Friday night card games – the kids watching TV in the living room, smiling at the whoops of laughter coming from the alleged grownups at the kitchen table.

     As Angela and I moved into high school, we weren’t together on Fridays much any more – she and I were dating, but not each other; we’d lost Tim to his Friday night teenage pursuits years earlier. But the families were still close; the camping trips and Christmas Eve visits and shared twilight summer evenings continued unabated. Then my family moved away, and things went sour for both families. Affairs, money, illness, death…the stuff of life caught up with our wide-eyed idealism and snuffed it like a candle in the wind.

     Though my hometown memories took a nasty turn at the end, Danville has played a more central role in my life than it has for most of my contemporaries. Since several of my childhood friends and lots of family still lived there, I visited frequently. I had a girlfriend there for a while. While working at Kings Dominion, I met and dated a Richmond-area girl who was attending Averett College, as well as a Danville girl who had just graduated from Stratford College. I nearly returned permanently in the late seventies. I was briefly engaged to a high school sweetheart. Those relationships didn’t last, but my hometown affair did, despite the gradual decay and the ghetto-ization of my lower-middle-class renter’s neighborhood. I didn’t see my hometown objectively; I saw it through the misty unquestioning eyes of a lover.

     I’d drive around a bit whenever I’d visit – past First Baptist Church, to the empty lot that was once the home of John L. Berkeley Elementary School, and especially to East Paxton Street. When in North Carolina last summer for my dad’s funeral, I spent an entire morning roaming the alleys of my old neighborhood, peeking into the backyards, sitting in the car in front of my house.

     For the first time, I understood the pull of this old two-story house, crumbling and condemned, the biggest eyesore on a street rife with eyesores: it was the last place my parents were truly happy.

     And I realized that the house’s pull ultimately rested in my wondering – wondering how it might have been different if we had stayed. The house personified not only joy and hearth and home, but lost opportunity – we left town; everything changed and my parents drifted…drifted from the same street we’d lived on for twelve years, the same town where they had spent all their lives…until they drifted apart for good. Could it have ended differently? Would it have mattered if we had stayed? Wasn’t a big part of what held us together not only bonds of love, but bonds of place?

     As children, my generation was generally unaware of adulthood’s woes lurking just around the corner – alcoholism, divorce, political alienation, the gradual decline in style and substance of everyday life. We rejoiced and marveled alongside our parents at the advances of comfort and civilization…affordable home air conditioning that took us off our porches and out of the yards; the excitement of the first Riverside Drive shopping center, with its vast pasture of subdivided blacktop that made Driver’s Ed parallel parking practice as outdated as women wearing white gloves on Sunday; affordable long-distance phone service; the first late night convenience store.

          We were Americans, and America was on the move, riding the ‘Go-Go Wave’ to the infinite power: fast food joints, shopping malls, bypasses that cut off long-standing neighborhood businesses, drive-through banks of brick and drywall that differed from a drive-through dry cleaner only by virtue of signage. All of it was ugly, garish, soulless…and convenient – our new watchword. We aspired to clean-n-comfy, fat-n-happy, well-to-do; access, speed, and acres of parking. Cookie-cutter urban sprawl paused on its Sherman-esque march across the Piedmont, squatting on broad swaths of farmland, dropping ungainly turds called ‘office parks’ and ‘subdivisions’ and ‘shopping experiences’ (with even its own character continually refined until no soul or individual ownership remained, only another Office Max or Lowe’s or Best Buy or Outback Steak House.)

     But we didn’t see what was coming. Our town, even a way of life, was dying. The fabric mill thrived, though it wasn’t at the production peak of the fifties; the sixties may have been a down cycle, but the town had experienced those before. The discerning eye of Dan River customers might wander during a recession, but they always returned in more prosperous times. The Surgeon General made noises about cigarettes, but Danville’s warehouses still brimmed with bundles of broad leaf, and the smell of cured tobacco was still as much a harbinger of fall’s arrival as were burning leaves or the sticky-sweet of the town fair’s candy apples.

     When my generation grew up swimming at the downtown YMCA, eating Popsicles from the corner market, and walking to school, America – the one built around cities and small towns – was falling apart. It was confused and fractured and Danville fell right into step.  So what if 7-11 ran Mister Bell's corner store out of business...they had Slurpees and Big Gulps! The same kids excited by the arrival of the first McDonald’s in 1969 witnessed the darkening of the Quik-E-Shop and all the What-A-Burger and Wimpy’s locations within a few years. But it didn’t matter, because we were leaving anyway, right?

     It did matter, because the noise was growing, an incessant white noise of progress wrapped in a colorful, neat Styrofoam container; it overwhelmed our sense of place, a siren song branding any nay-sayers as antiquated, behind the times, even Luddites. Leaving our hometown for a better life was one thing – but where was the better life?

     Technology freed pop records from their three-minute format; the songwriter’s art required less craft. Today’s pop often doesn’t even use the chromatic scale. Poetry no longer rhymed; sonnets were out. Paintings were no longer required to look like anything, or even represent anything. Architecture no longer adhered to any esthetic or rules.

     And we moved.

     Yes, we moved. On average, every four years. Four years! Can you believe that? The narrative line of our lives broke down; the incomprehensible but vivid sense of belonging, of permanence, of gentle parabola that we refer to as place all but disappeared for too many of us.

          About ten years after moving away, I was in town for a visit. When I stopped off at a friend’s house, the note on the door read: Playing softball at Stonewall Jackson. See you there! There was solace in knowing where Stonewall Jackson School was, and that I was going to a place where I, too, had played many a church league softball game (and misjudged many a fly ball in the lights until I grew accustomed to them.) Upon arrival, I took note of the friendly on-field banter, the familiar comments from the opposing bleachers, the small moments shared, the spontaneous plans to meet at Bubba’s for a soft-serve cone after the game. I knew even then I was missing something, but at twenty-seven, I couldn’t process the feeling.

     There were other times when the pull of home was at least gravity’s equal. I spent chunks of work time in North Carolina a few years ago, and my generous and loving wife graciously agreed to relocate. When she landed a dream job at Johns Hopkins, though, we decided the Carolina Plan wasn’t in the cards.

     What was in the cards, though, was Mt. Airy, Maryland, and our turn-of-the-twentieth-century home on a small-town Main Street in what was once a wild and wooly railroad town thirty miles west of Baltimore. 

      Is this house, purchased eighteen months ago, a ‘center that can hold’ for us? It’s not unmarred, for sure. We shop at a Wal-Mart from time to time because there is nowhere else in town to purchase sundries; the house is only a half-mile from the community fire station/rescue squad, and we could do without the drone of Harleys buzzing to and fro every weekend from Memorial Day till Labor Day.  But it’s a well-built and soulful house of hardwood floors and screen doors, constructed with durable materials and restored by the previous owners with loving care. Residents of Mt. Airy spend money in the small downtown stores and restaurants, and they take pride in their houses and spend time and money keeping them from falling apart. Some care for their neighborhood enough to put time and money into the community, too.

     Yes, we bought an old house and signed a pact between our home and ourselves, promising to provide the sweat, money and time necessary to preserve the house’s integrity for another generation and beyond. We have a ways to go; building community isn’t possible without giving more of ourselves than we’ve been willing or able. I’m not sure why that is; I suspect inertia discourages a clean break free of the townhouse-community mentality holding us prisoner and diminishing our lives. And, I suppose, it’s the knowledge that as good as Mt. Airy can be, it’s never going to really be home; perhaps I feel just a bit like I’m cheating on my true love.

     It’s never going to be perfect for me. It can’t be. It’s not ‘where I’m from.’ I have no deposits here, no chits of time, family, friends to draw from, no dividends to enjoy. When we uproot, we leave those deposits behind, a currency not usually held in sufficient regard. Pursuing our uniquely American dreams, we too often wander the landscape with empty pockets, owing no one, confusing unfettered-ness with freedom. Repaying debt – offering payment through blood, sweat, and tears to the schools, churches, and communities that we owe – is part of our spiritual dynamic; without it, we live ungrateful and unfulfilled.

     Perhaps I feel this more intensely as a childless person, I don’t know. At least when one has children, we can point to them as that core value, the ‘meaning’ of our lives. But I wonder if this is really the case; don’t our children provide a window onto the homeward instinct, rather than the instinct itself? Aren’t our familial ties a reflection of our core, rather than its raison d’etre?

     My wife and I have begun gardening, though so far it’s mostly been a writ of execution for the unlucky plants we pluck off the shelves of the neighborhood landscaping center. We still have unpacking, organizing, remodeling to do. More important than any of that, though, is the soul work needed to make the house a home, and our lives as rich as we can make them in a world that doesn’t treasure that which makes life most rewarding. We are on our way, though, and in the perfect place to do it, at a perfect time. All we have to do is want it enough.

     There are no guarantees in life, so I am grateful for at least the beginnings of a third act. I’ve yet to get the thing right, but I’m finally on the path and drawing closer every day.

     I can’t wait to see how the play is going to end.