You Can Never Go Home Again (except when you can)

with love, from Portland

It’s hard to describe why things feel familiar. If I were airdropped at random here, to a neighborhood block I’d never seen, I would immediately know it deep in my bones. I couldn’t be anywhere else. 

It’s not in the buildings themselves. I don’t suspect the little bungalows and ranch homes are particularly regional. I keep trying to put my finger on it. Maybe it’s more about the tangle of raspberry and blackberry bushes along the sides of the road. The way that moss creeps up the curbs, and puffs up through every crack in the cement. That feels a bit closer to right.

Being back in Oregon isn’t like returning to my college town. Whenever I visit the sleepy Pioneer Valley, I feel a sense of home there, too. The reasons for this are clear and rooted in adult memory. The obvious nostalgia of formative friendships, sexual stirrings, big ideas, pinned to the place. Here, in this lawn, we accidentally woke up the morning after attempting to stargaze a meteor shower, having chit-chatted so hard that we missed the stars entirely. Here, in this crosswalk, I ran into a post after a certain curly-haired boy biked by, shirtless, on the first 60-degree day of spring. Ah yes: here, we made an ill-fated attempt at our own sangria with a jug of Carlo Rossi and plastic cups of dining hall Sprite.

I moved away from greater Portland when I was in middle school. I don’t have an adult’s understanding of this place. I couldn’t tell a visitor where to dine or what sights to see. The geography of the city is mystifying even with its orderly quadrants; I never had to decode the public bus system, nor navigate traffic. The outlines of my childhood adventures do remain vivid: weekend car camping; the rose garden and the waterfront and the zoo. My dad and I would run an errand at Hippo Hardware and make a detour for Italian sausages at the sandwich shop down the way (at which point, he would never fail to recall with delight that the eponymous owner used to grow weed in the planter boxes in the parking lot). No coherent picture, though, of “home” as a sharply drawn physical place. 

I’m not even sure it’s the familiarity of the people here that makes it feel like home. Because of course, there is little permanence to people. On this visit, we saw some friends of my parents’, who live in the hills of Northwest Portland. This man was the person my parents entrusted to watch my sister during my birth. As a toddler, I proclaimed him to be my favorite adult. I loved his dark brown skin, his glossy mustache, and the redolence of his aftershave.

~1986

This visit, he was recovering from a kidney transplant surgery. So was his wife (unbelievably, his donor). He was so much shorter than I remembered, even than the few years ago when we last saw them. But as ever, the wave of his aftershave hit me like a wall. The same scent, still. That feels even closer yet. 

Our oldest family friends in Portland were a couple who swept my recently-immigrated parents under their wing . My father had landed a job at a primate research facility, which brought my parents from East Lansing, Michigan to Beaverton, Oregon. Jean was the secretary at the research lab. Seeing that this young family had no one, she invited my parents to celebrate all the American holidays together. Each year as children we’d decorate Easter bonnets made from paper plates and streamers in her basement, and have an egg hunt in their living room. Thanksgiving was a traditional feast (with the occasional midcentury delight like a molded ring of lime-marshmallow jello studded with carrots and cabbage). The dishes would sprawl out endlessly on a massive, formally-laid dinner table beneath a sparklingly clean chandelier. For my sister and me, those were the most reliable rituals of our young lives. Jean passed away in 2018; her husband had been gone for several years by then. This weekend, we visited with their daughter, also a dear friend, now in her late seventies herself. We all felt a now-familiar twinge of incompleteness during our reunion. Home is also a loss, the absence of a thing that should, by all rights, have been there forever.

~1991

I worry about where to be, sometimes. How to become rooted but stay free; what anchoring my own growing family might require. It brings me some comfort to think that if home is in a puff of moss, a whiff of cologne, or even in the vacuum created by the loss of a thing, I…I don’t know. I still can’t put my finger on it — but maybe I don’t have to worry quite so hard.

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This past Sunday’s Assisted Living playlist is chock-a-block with new music. Tune in to hear us DJ live on Sunday nights 6-8p ET and catch up on the tunes here, in the meantime: