You can go home again.

HOME?

Thomas Wolfe said “You can’t go home again.” And a lot of people have quoted him through the years.

And, frankly, I have always believed them. I left home when I was seventeen and I barely looked back. College, graduate school, work, a career, obligations, responsibilities – these all helped me to redefine myself not as a Midwesterner, but as a cosmopolitan guy who worked in New York City and had a home in Connecticut. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Kind of like a 1940s movie with backdrops of very tall buildings and then Father Comes Home to rock walls and beautiful old farm houses. Frank Sinatra, singing “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere….” Well, that’s exactly how it was. Okay. Not really. I did work in midtown, but my window opened up onto a sidewalk. And our home in Connecticut was a seventeen hundred square foot two family. Our apartment in that grand estate was about 850 square feet. It wasn’t exactly the image most people have of what that all looks like, but still. It was my life. I was successful. People said “Wow, I could never do everything you do.” I knew people. I went places. I did things.

And I was increasingly unhappy.

But going home to St. Louis? Not even on the holidays.

Oh sure, Mom and Dad were still in the house. Oakwood Avenue. Webster Park. Norman Rockwell. I grew up walking to elementary school, until I entered seventh grade. Then I walked to junior high, but the walk was shorter. High School was a couple of hundred feet further down the road. Had I chosen I could have continued to go to college and graduate school and never travel more than three blocks from home.

This is important stuff. My family has been very into education. Even my paternal grandmother, who didn’t make it past the eighth grade, was involved in teaching. Both my mom’s parents had their masters’ degrees, and both were teachers.

Mom taught music. Dad was an accounting professor. Not down the street at Webster College (now much more pretentiously known as Webster University) but downtown at Saint Louis University (why is it that they always spell out “St.”?). I could have had a good solid Jesuit education free of charge. But I still remember my mother telling me that I really needed to get out of town. I was barely seventeen, and she was telling me I needed to leave home. I never asked her why she did that.

I suppose that had more to do with her than it had to do with me. And truth be told, I knew that. She wasn’t trying to get rid of me as much as she wanted me to expand my horizons and explore all that I could find. At sixteen she left high school early and went off to college – not to Oberlin where she wanted to go to study music, but to Lindenwood College (now more pretentiously known as Lindenwood University), still in Missouri, which is what her father would allow her to do. More on him later.

So I got that big Barron’s book back in the seventies and I looked through the thing looking for schools that had good architecture programs. I don’t know why. If I had to I couldn’t design my way out of a strip mall. But I did find Rice University in Houston. They had an architecture school. More importantly, they had a free application. So I applied. And I got in.

It was a bumpy ride. I ended up being on the five-year plan. But in those five years I somehow decided that I should be a Man of God. I got my degree, and in another year found myself not in Austin, where I thought I might go to seminary, because I was trying my best to be a Native Texan, complete with the Texas flag bumper sticker on my car. No, I went to Manhattan, where I was dazzled by the energy and the pre-Guiliani grittiness of the Capital of the World. My friends in Texas thought I was jumping off the face of the earth.

Four years in New York City led me to three years in the not-so-romantic town of New Britain, Connecticut. I was 27 years old, gay, and in what felt like the Polish capital of the United States. I lasted three years before I was back in school again in Manhattan. Then, as a newly-minted psychotherapist, I opened an office in a relatively prestigious part of town. Never thought of myself as an East Side kind of guy, but it was Murray Hill, not the Upper East Side, and I made excuses like “It’s so close to Grand Central.” Plus my phone exchange was the same as the Ricardo’s – Murray Hill Five. Thanks to technology and number portability, I still have that number on my cell phone. 212. MUrray Hill Five.

But that was New York. Now, thirty-two years after I left, I find myself sleeping in the bedroom that I slept in as a teenager. Sharing the room now with my partner/husband/whatever. Looking at the same walls and the same furniture. Trying to imagine what had happened to my life that after over thirty years, I had become That Guy. You know. The one still living at home.

This was the room in which I first had sex. This was the room that had been my asylum. This was the room where I could lock the door and keep my sister out. My parents too for that matter. This was where I had memories of love, of lust, of fear, of accomplishment. My friend Clayton and I learned Calculus together in this room. My friend Chris and I both got naked and I was in awe of his body. My friend Kurt and I drank Seagram’s VO in that room. I painted the room in primary colors – rich red, deep blue, vibrant yellow. With curtains to match. Striped, primary-colored curtains. Thank God my mother painted the room and replaced the striped red, blue and yellow curtains with bland beige ones. They’re now gone, by the way. The carpet of course was, and still is, Seventies Shag, a mixture of synthetic blacks, oranges and yellows. It’s a palette of color which is guaranteed to make one gag.

And so I’m back. Mom is gone, her body giving way to the half-century of cigarette smoking that ruined her lungs. Dad is here, with a great sense of humor and a winning smile but all trapped in a body wrecked by Parkinson’s. The dog is happy. She has so many more options for sleeping on comfortable furniture. And Dan and I are trying to figure out how to make it all home.

When we first decided to move back to St. Louis, several people asked me beforehand and since about what it was like to move back home. I tried to explain to folk and to myself that I really wasn’t moving home. After all, I only lived in this house for eight years. I left Webster Groves as a optimistic teenager and returned as a cynical middle-aged man. Webster Groves is a suburb of St. Louis. Webster Park is a neighborhood in Webster Groves. Some might say THE neighborhood. St. Louis has changed – a lot. So have I. Webster Park, not so much. But I said to myself You can never really go home. I was returning to something new, I convinced myself. I had never really lived here as an adult. Defensively, I would repeat, no, I’m not going “home.” Home was Connecticut. St. Louis was just where I was from.

But in the few short months that I have been back, I’ve discovered something. “They” were wrong. You can go home. Oh, maybe not everyone. People from the Ninth Ward can’t go home. People whose lives are changed so dramatically through the transient norms we have as families can’t necessarily go home. Homes sometimes are destroyed. Not just houses, but homes. But as an all-encompassing maxim of truth, I’ve discovered the phrase doesn’t hold. Because I did go home. I’m there.

And frankly, it scares the crap out of me.

It’s not the memories that bother me. Being legally-married as a gay man in Connecticut and living in a state like Missouri is a little weird. I mean, after all, what is it with having to protect everyone else’s marriage by declaring mine null and void in the state constitution. Way to go, Show-Me State. Having really grown up while in college in downtown Houston and graduate school in Manhattan certainly has made me feel comfortable in the urban environment – this suburban family stuff is a little foreign now. But it is, in a word, home. I don’t remember the names of the streets, but they look familiar. I explore neighborhoods which had been long overlooked by my limited boundaries. I find myself talking to people more – strangers, shop owners, customer service representatives on the phone. For example, I know that my insurance agent likes being called Angie rather than Angela, but her company can’t incorporate her derivative name into its database, and thus her email includes the name she doesn’t like so much. Furthermore, she knows that my sister, whose name is the same, prefers being called Angela rather than Angie. My insurance agent. We had this conversation. On the phone. I’ve never met her face-to-face.

The bank manager calls me. The local grocery store has private accounts. It’s a little Mayberry RFD, but it works for me. And that perhaps is the scariest thing of all.

Then there’s that stupid “St. Louis Question” thing. I mean, when did that get a name? Oh sure, I’d experienced the moment before. Even one night years ago during the days leading up to Christmas in nineteen ninety something I was on a Metro-North train heading home to Connecticut. We had been out to dinner with a friend, and everyone in the Bar Car was in a rowdy mood. A very bejeweled woman of a certain age sitting next to me indicated in conversation that she was originally from St. Louis. I told her “I grew up there too.” She then actually posed the St. Louis Question: “What high school did you go to?” “Webster Groves,” I said. “So did I,” she replied. Class of ’46. A little bit before me.

The St. Louis Question. That need to identify oneself with one’s secondary alma mater. Affton. University City. Parkway (North, South, East or West, you decide), Kirkwood (ick – our archrivals), Webster Groves (Go Statemen. Yes, Statesmen. Get over it.) And those are only the suburban schools. Of course if you were Catholic the answer would be Chaminade or Saint Louis U if you were a boy, and Visitation or Mary I if you were a girl. If your were rich the answer would unequivocally be John Burroughs (sorry, Country Day.) The St. Louis Question immediately identifies you, defines you, forces you into a box from which there is no return. Mehlville? Well, sorry dear. Hazelwood? A very big place. Fort Zumwalt? What the hell is that? A school in the city? Well, you might as just well say “I’m from the city.”

But Webster Groves, man, we thought we were it. After all, we had that fiasco of that documentary that CBS did on us. Granted it was in 1966. But more recently, back in the nineties, Time Magazine did put us on the cover. Screw Kirkwood and their Pioneers. We had the tophat and the cane. We were the Statesmen. Strangely, we even became pretty good at football.

God knows it ain’t all Peaches and Cream (actually the name of a class I took in high school). And a lot of it, if I may presume to say, is pretty funny. More than one person has said to me “You better be writing this stuff down.” They’re usually people living on I-95 corridor, but still.

So that’s what I’m going to do here. Write some stuff down. You don’t have to like it. Hell, you don’t have to read it. But I think I need to do it.

Because I’ve discovered something which deserves – no, needs expression. I’ve found out that there are things in life which simply must be shared.

I’ve traveled a fair bit. I’ve been in 48 of the 50 states (Watch out Nebraska and Alaska!). I’ve been in most of the provinces of Canada. I don’t know how many countries I’ve been to, but they include weird places like Bermuda and Liechtenstein and Russia. Bet you’ve never seen those three mentioned together in one sentence before. I’ve stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and decided to go to the Starbucks across the street, Cold War be damned. But. One thing I was never counting on.

I’ve discovered that you can, in fact, go home.