You Can’t Go Home . . . You Can’t Leave Home
I wonder how many people at 53 can still return to their parents’ house and be in the same town where they were born? For me, that’s Neosho, MO. “The Flower Box City.” About an hour north of Wal-Mart-Dom, tucked into the corner of Missouri near OK, AR, and KS.
Yesterday my brother and I drove around to the places where we grew up: the little houses on Reid Road (we lived in 621 . . . then 617), our grandparents’ house across the pasture up on the hill, Field School (the elementary school about a mile away that we walked to in good weather), the square where we delivered papers for the Neosho Daily News (owned and operated by our family), the building on Jefferson Street where our church met, then up the hill on Jefferson Street where our other grandparents lived.
You can’t go home again, said Thomas Wolfe. True. But you can’t ever really leave home, either. It stays inside you. Neosho is Lake Wobegon — a place of unique characters, courageous lives, nurturing, faith, frustrations, etc. It’s where I memorized much of the book of Acts as a boy; it’s where I played little league ball; it’s where I hung out with my maternal granddad and then my dad at the newspaper; it’s where I stayed up “late” (9:00 pm) with my maternal grandmother and my cool young aunt playing Monopoly and Clue; it’s where my paternal grandparents drilled me on books of the Bible and state capitals (Nevada? Carson City); it’s where I went to VBS and gospel meetings; it’s where I shared a room with my brother; and it’s where I left in the fall of 1974.
Except I never really left. Here, alone at 4:30 a.m. in the kitchen of the house where I lived as a senior in high school, now with my wife, my sons, my daughter-in-law, and my granddaughter — I realize that in some ways the “home-ness” of Neosho is in our DNA.
Anyone else have a “Neosho”?
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I started this year writing about Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side
Tuesday we finally got to see the movie. Go! Seriously: go! After a few weeks pass, I’ll figure out just where to squeeze it into my top ten sports movies of all time.
In a city with a history of racism, a city where the divide seems insurmountable, one strong-willed, Christ-following woman did the unthinkable: she invited a homeless young man into her family. Not for show. Not as part of a church program. Not because he was huge and might one day play pro ball.
She was on the road to Jericho. And she stopped.
That’s what the little book of James thinks of as faith.
I’m 30. I lived in 15 different places before I was 10 years old and at 30, I’ve lost count. I have an image of a town I lived in as a little kid until I was nearly 9, but altogether, that comprises about 20% of my life, about 6 years.
But I remember the house. I remember sitting by the floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the fireplace, reading while the snow piled another foot or two outside. I remember the neighbors, the “other grandparents” who basically adopted my brothers and me, since our nearest grandparents were 6 states, three days and worlds away, known only as voices on the telephone and boxes and letters on birthday and Christmas.
I’ve never been back. Probably I won’t; there are other things I remember from that time, too, that complicate ever making that journey. But in many ways, you’re right: it doesn’t leave me.
The southwest-side of Chicago, in the Polish neighborhood where I grew up. I remember walking to the 7-11 and Tastee Freeze with my brother & the neighborhood kids, my dad letting us use a part of our garage for a clubhouse, my dad making an ice-skating rink in our backyard, climbing the neighbor’s tree, learning to be a Southsider who is also a Cubs fan from the same neighbors (who were my grandparent’s age), taking a CTA bus home from school, that first time I drove myself to school, walk-a-thons from my HS to Comisky Park, and sadly, I remember the graffitti gang signs on garages, and walking around with mace in my hand. And then I remember the move out to the suburbs the year before I left for college (although I drove 45 minutes to finish my senior year in the city.) My parents still live in the same suburb, but it has never felt like Chicago did to me.
Sweet home, Chicago!
My parents still live on the land that my grandparents homesteaded in 1912. Southeastern New Mexico is not the end of the world but if you go 30 miles west of Artesia, you can see it from there. I love going home and walking the same roads where I rode my horse and learned how to drive a stick shift in “Old Yeller.” My Grandmother was one of the starters of our congregation and the communion table is still with our family. My dad has been an Elder since the early 70′s and my mother is teaching a 4th generation in her kindergarten Bible class. I have seen our little church weather lots of storms, ministers move in and out, but the core people stay and live out their faith. It makes me wonder what churches would look like if there was only one in a town and you couldn’t hop over to another church when things weren’t going your way.
Blessings for the season!
I’m 40, currently sitting in snowy Abilene with my “grown-up” family (husband and kids). Saturday we will pack up and go to my childhood family in Monroe, Louisiana. We will go to the house that my parents moved into when I was 7. Sunday, we will wake up and go to the church that I went to as soon as I made an appearance in a church building as an infant, the same church that my grandparents helped start from another congregation across town several years before I was born. It’s the church where I was baptized, did my youth group stuff and was married. My dad is now an elder there, just like his dad was when I was a little girl. Down the road from the church is now a Starbuck’s that used to be a 7-11 where my grandparents would take my brother and me for Icees after church while my parents finished talking. Down the road from there is the high school that my parents attended. and both of their childhood homes. There are many things I appreciate about where my children are now growing up and worship, but I wish I could also give them that kind of “hometown legacy”.
The Blind Side? Oh, yeah, amazing. But I have found a whole new soapbox about the NCAA. I cannot shake the “inquisition” out of my head. “What is to prevent other well-to-do families from bringing in athletes like yourself and sending them to their favorite schools?” My gut-level response to that is: “…and that would be so awful?????” Yes, I know it entirely misses the point of the greatness of the whole movie, but the NCAA has completely run amok.
Thank you for allowing me to get ALL of that off of my chest!
We moved from my hometown when I was 11. My mother, newly divorced with four kids to raise alone, had found a new job. Now, as a mother myself, I cannot imagine how hard that day was more than 30 years ago.
My friendships were formed in our new town. But my heart remains in my hometown. It truly feeds my spirit to return there and visit my aunt who still lives two doors from the house we left. And on New Years Day, I will get to do just that.
Steve read what you wrote about Neosho, only he went to Benton, and said gee, I could of wrote that. Swimming in Hickory Creek and jumping off the bridge, also jumping off the East 86 bridge.
I lived in Flat Rock, Michigan and the Flat Rock Schools were our social life. I worked at them too until about 12 years ago. I will always care about the people there and my moms house is still there.
My “Neosho” is Midland – where I lived from 2nd grade to 12th, where I worked at a beloved coffee house, marched at Memorial Stadium holding a flute on Friday nights, went to youth group and Bible Drill and youth choir, and made many of my dearest friends.
But your Neosho is part of me too, Mike – I’ve driven past Field Elementary and Neosho High School, and Senior Hill, and I remember Christmas Eve services in my grandparents’ little Lutheran church. And this past Thanksgiving, I got to introduce Jeremiah to the town I grew up loving, and the Mailes clan, and the rest of my cousins. What a blessing.
Seriously, The Blind Side is a great movie. I would have liked for the stars be unknowns so that the message of the movie would have shone through even brighter. But few flaws in this story. Everyone should see it and then go and do likewise.
Big Flat, Arkansas is my Neosho. Sadly, the town and those who made it such a great place to be from, have died. How lucky I feel to have experienced such love and kindness from a community, something I never appreciated until I left home.
I always assumed every town had a Jack whittling at the country store, or a Houston and Arie playing dominoes at the shed, but not so. It’s funny how so many people make up the person we become.
My heart aches each time I drive home, it aches for times long past.
You can go home again, but what you are looking for when you get there, that is always with you.
Thanks for those stories. I’m up early looking at the several inches of snow. Sitting at the same table (at least same place) I sat when I was 17.
I went home again several years ago…except it was to the church home I first remember…Central in Houston on Montrose (which my grandfather helped build), now home to Houston’s library…stood on the side street and saw the earlier building which was turned into a fellowship room…walked the sidewalk and brick patios where we once played on grass…took a picture of the cornerstone that says “Central Church of Christ”…and in my mind I saw the church family who first helped nurture my faith…the Coffmans, Murpheys, Pattersons and others…all with the Lord now. I went to Reagor Springs last spring…the building is no longer there…but the community is where my maternal great grandparents first heard the gospel and were baptized…where my maternal grandfather was baptized…where I was baptized. Home…it’s where the heart is…and I’m thankful for parents and grandparents who made a home in every house we lived in. Yesterday we, along with our children and grandchildren, gathered in the house my parents built 50 years ago, where Mother still lives…and made more memories.
Hey brother i hope this finds you blessed. I see you connected with Leonard Sweet. He’s helped me with a possible door with Thomas nelson…he’s an encouraging friend, I follow you on twitter and i had a funny reply to your tweet today but you could not receive it uness you follow me…Here’s me twitter user name if you want to follow me. “toddlollar”
I grew up in Knox County, Missouri. That’s in the northeast section of the state. After I grew up I went to college first in Moberly, Missouri, then in Searcy, Arkansas. After graduation I moved to Brazil and began mission work. After being there for 3 years I moved my family (I married shortly after arriving in Brazil) to New Mexico. We’ve now been in New Jersey for almost 4 years, and I work in Manhattan. There’s no way I could ever move back to the place I was raised. There’s nothing there for us. Yet, it wasn’t until I was away that I began to realize how special that place is to me.
In 2008 we made a visit to Missouri, staying with my mother on the farm where I was raised. It was strange without my father, who passed away suddenly in 2005. Yet as I walked the pastures and drove the back roads I felt deeply that I was home, however impossible (and undesirable) it would be for me to live there again. I commented to my wife that you practically couldn’t throw a stone on the farm without hitting a place where I could name a specific memory.
The farm I was raised on belonged to my paternal grandmother’s family. She was raised there too, though in a house that was destroyed long before I came along. My mother also owns the Gonnerman homestead, the place where four generations of men (including my father) farmed. There is no one to take my father’s place in the line. None of his three sons became a farmer, and he had no daughters to bring in a son-in-law.
Several cemeteries hold the remains of generations of different branches of my family in that and a neighboring county.
The local Catholic parish house (it’s the second largest building used for worship in the diocese) has been the site of christenings, first communions, confirmations, weddings and funerals of 7 generations of my mother’s family. Having left that faith behind when I made a personal decision to follow Christ at age 17, I am disconnected from those roots as well.
However separated by time, distance and perspective I may be from the place where I was raised, it is still very deeply and truly a part of me, at the core of my identity.
So yes, I have my Neosho. You just have to drive farther north to get there.
Thanks for asking.