First Home, Second Home

      I grew up in the same city where I was born, and like many others who suddenly and unaccountably find themselves middle-aged, have started to become sentimental about my hometown. Even as an adolescent, I took a certain amount of pride in having lived nowhere else although I don’t recall ever voicing this to anyone outside my immediate family. 

      This pride might lead one to think that Gadsden and I were a perfect, or at least a good, match in terms of political persuasions and social success, but life is nothing if not ironic. Politically, I am and always was to the left of the median mindset of both Gadsden and Alabama. In high school, the place that either makes or breaks us in the popularity point spread, I was a zealous student, also known as a grind, and paid virtually no attention to anything that fell outside the academic sphere. The football team could win, lose or draw; I cared not. Needless to say, I had only a few close friends, and they were pretty much like me. 

      I am, therefore, both surprised and not surprised by my recent renewal of interest in the place. And in referring to it as  “the place,” I am not being disrespectful but rather am choosing my terms carefully. For it has finally and rather sadly occurred to me that between defining Gadsden (or any locale) as its inhabitants past and present, and defining it as a geographical setting overlaid with manmade structures, images of the latter tend to prevail. 

      Perhaps I should not be too self-condemnatory about this. It could merely be a remnant of the child’s literal mindedness carried over into adulthood. I remember the surprise I felt upon learning in the early grades that the size of cities is measured by the number of their inhabitants; until then I had assumed that square mileage was the criterion. Not people but place. 

      Then too, it could be a natural defense mechanism against the fact that, like me, many acquaintances of my own generation no longer live there and even more from my parents’ generation, like my parents themselves, no longer live anywhere. 

      Simple arithmetic plays a part in this. I left Gadsden at age 26 when I married and moved to South Carolina and will tolerate no hairsplitting harangues over the expendable facts that between 18 and 26 I attended college and graduate school and then briefly held two jobs, all in other states. Despite such temporary to-ings and fro-ings, Gadsden remained my permanent home, well and long ago defined as the place where they have to take you in no matter what. 

      In the years that followed, there was a certain security in knowing that Gadsden was still the clear frontrunner for residential longevity, an essentially intellectual perspective that effectively held off any emotional inclinations to actually return there. But upon celebrating my 52^nd birthday last month, I realized that Gadsden’s lead had run out, that things finally were neck and neck. Neglected longings, sensing the breach in my defenses, decided their hour had come and began maneuvering for the inside rail. 

      “You aren’t really serious about pulling up stakes and relocating us all to Gadsden, are you?”, my husband Peter recently asked. 

      “Of course not,” I lied. 

      He raised his eyebrows.  “So how come our computer has suddenly sprouted throngs of bookmarks for Gadsden websites, especially things like the school system and houses for sale in the historic district?  I certainly didn’t put them there, and neither did the Internet Fairy. ”

      Stay calm, I told myself. “Pictures. The miracle of cyberspace.  Surely you agree that looking at pictures of Gadsden is a lot easier than moving there, not to mention cheaper?”

      He turned this simple proposition over for several moments, searching for the fine print. “Well, if that’s all…,” he murmured, his voice trailing off, but I don’t think he bought it. 

      My cover blown, it was time to seek allies. I put the following proposition to three impartial, unbiased observers. 

      “How would you like to live close to Uncle Bruce?”

      “YA-A-A-A-A-A-Y!!!”, they screamed like scalded banshees. 

      “I heard that”, Peter said from the next room. “Why don’t you just ask them if they want to move to the North Pole next door to Santa?”

      My brother Bruce is an aerospace engineer who, among his other virtues and accomplishments, is a licensed pilot and proud Cessna owner who takes his niece and nephews flying whenever he visits, which is never often enough to suit them. After living in Seattle for eleven years, he was transferred by Boeing to their Huntsville establishment, a mere seventy miles from Gadsden. Right back (almost) where he started from. 

      He hadn’t unpacked his toothbrush before the five of us descended upon him, and the last leg of our route from South Carolina to Huntsville took us directly through Gadsden. Traveling Highway 431 from Anniston and Glencoe, we drove along Meighan Boulevard quite near my family’s first house in East Gadsden; crossed the Coosa River into Gadsden proper; passed straight through the intersection with Eighth Street which, if taken, would have led us up Lookout Mountain to our second house, and finally through Alabama City and Attalla and out of the county. I turned around in my seat and stared out the rear window. 

      “What’s wrong?”  Peter asked. “You look positively spooked. ”

      “There’s a reason for that,” I replied, still facing backwards. “This is a first, a genuine first. Never have I gone to Gadsden without stopping. When I lived there, it was my starting point and after I left and returned for visits, it was my stopping point. Always one or the other. But this time it was neither, just another town to pass through on a 425-mile trip to somewhere else. No doubt a grave offense to the lares and penates. I’ll afraid of being struck dead by avenging lightning. ”

      Peter shook his head. “Angry gods. Voodoo birthdays. You have to get a grip. Honey, it’s very simple. We’re all imprinted by our first environment. Like Lorenz’s goslings. Or ying and yang. Then we’re doomed to go through life vaguely disoriented, yearning for some mysterious unknown quantity that turns out to be nothing more than our first back yard. As soon as we recognize and acknowledge this, we’ve exorcised the demon. It has no more power over us, and we can get on with our lives. You were almost there, almost cured, and then Bruce moved back. I could see all the progress you’d made just slip away,” he said, sadly shaking his head. “Just slip away. ”

      Since Peter’s main interest these days is that universal favorite, worrying about old age, I suddenly realized I had been going about this all wrong. Chatting up the advantages of a pied a terre in Gadsden as a sound financial investment could prove just what I needed, the thin end of the wedge, so to speak. For this, I enlisted Bruce’s aid. 

      “See ?”  I pointed downward as Bruce swept low over the water. “That didn’t exist until I was thirteen or so. Throughout my childhood, Rainbow Drive was the road to our grandparents’ home. It was a beautiful area. Untouched wilderness, as they say. Then one day a fleet of capitalism’s finest bulldozed flora and fauna into grieving memory, dammed the creek and voila, Lake Gadsden was born. We could buy a condo on the water, sublet it for now and then move in someday when we retire. ”

      “And for money we will use what?”, Peter asked. 

      “Well, there’s your IRA. ”  I tried not to let excitement creep into my voice, but it was useless. “I mean, I know you’d be penalized for early withdrawal, but it might be worth it in the long run, and besides, we could…. ”

      “Touch one penny,” Peter said, his eyes flashing hellfire, “and the phrase ‘early withdrawal’ is going to take on a whole new meaning for you. ”I decided to investigate other possibilities. 

      “Bruce”, I said sweetly. “How you like to go in with us on a sure thing?  You’d be an equal partner, of course.”

      Ordinarily, Bruce is a man of few words, but that afternoon he made an exception and really blossomed. “Pete, “ he said, “if you push hard, and I mean hard, on the door, really put a shoulder into it, it will open. Keep it that way for just a few seconds, and between the two of us, we can shove her out. Deal?”

      Silenced is not defeated, I always say. If the relentless passage of time brought me to this turn, the passage of yet a little more will fortify my position. I have been a librarian for over twenty-eight years, and in another year and eight months (actually, one year, eight months, two weeks, four days and seven hours, but who’s counting?), I will be eligible for retirement. Every time Peter turns ashen when contemplating how to finance three none-too-distant college educations, I casually remind him how much more money we’d have were I to get a another full-time job after leaving this one. I also remind him, in case he’s forgotten since the last time I mentioned it, that the South Carolina Retirement System does not permit double dipping, making me ineligible for about 95% of all librarian positions that become available. In South Carolina, that is. Of course, were we to move to another state, we wouldn’t have that problem. 

      “But I keep forgetting, “I say while studying the backs of my hands,  “you don’t want to move. Ah, well. When the time comes, and come it will, we can always turn to crime or sell the house and live in a mud hut.” Two can play this game. 

      And mixed with longing there is, of course, the inevitable regret. 

      Like everyone else, I’ve heard the clichés about people who yearn to travel to distant lands – the more distant, the better – while  completely neglecting what lies at hand. And so, I am sorry to report, it was with me. When younger, I was fortunate enough to do a brief bit of foreign travel, and for years afterward my fondest dream was to someday live in England and tour extensively in Europe. Yet not twenty-five miles from Gadsden is a church listed by Cook’s as one of the one hundred most important buildings to see in North America. Not only have I never been there, I didn’t know of its existence until adulthood. I‘m sure I never heard any family members mention it, either. 

      So one spinoff of my guilt is that I have become interested in maps. Nothing scholarly, just ordinary, common maps such as are given away by highway departments everywhere. I keep them in my bedside table, my briefcase, my desk drawer at work, and the glove box of the car. I study the roads, where they begin and end, the names of the towns they pass through, and consequently I know far more about Alabama now than when I lived there. If I spy an Alabama automobile tag, something that happens about once a week, I scream out, in a voice more appropriate for world peace or cancer cures, “Twenty-three!” or “Fifty-eight!” or “Seventeen!” or whatever the two lead-off numbers are. These reveal the county in which the car is registered, and I immediately pull from behind the visor a printout listing them all. Officiously I inform my couldn’t-care-less, she’s-at-it-again family, “That car is from Conecuh County” while offering a silent prayer that I am pronouncing it correctly. After all, until recently, I didn’t know there was a Conecuh County, in Alabama or anywhere else. 

      And we can all thank the inscrutable gods I wasn’t at the wheel the day a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a “Thirty-one” tag (for Etowah County, Gadsden’s locale – that one I knew without consulting the hot sheet) appeared two lanes over in rush hour, freeway traffic.  Wanting to get closer, I kept urging Peter to try maneuvers that would have Mario Andretti breathing into a paper bag.  (“But it could be someone I know!!”)

      Was it Robert Frost who observed that a liberal is someone who cannot stand up for himself?  Well, I consider myself a liberal, more or less, and if the observation is true, perhaps I should heed its predictive value for my own situation. As retirement eligibility draws ever nearer, the déjà vu of leaving a home of twenty-six years duration will undermine my resolve, and I will suddenly become an expert on the desirability of remaining where we are. Columbia is larger, more thriving, near the beach, has a university right here when the children are ready, etc.  etc.  Once again, I will strive to envision houses and street scenes and unalterable attachments. I will panic if recall begins to fade.