Captain Reverend Mother

I walked through the double doors and felt seventeen again. Floor wax hung in the air and familiar yet foreign faces carried pieces of my beginning. Scores have since passed when I graduated, which seems impossible because, surely, I am not that old.

My freshman just read the Odyssey in English class. He came home talking about Odysseus and the 20 years it took to get home. I have spent the past 26 years in the Navy, crossing oceans ancient sailors could not have imagined. Last weekend I returned to my own Ithaca, the place that launched me into the wider world. My son studied the story while I lived it, as he now stands at the edge of uncharted waters and possibility just as Odyssues and I had.

The Odyssey is more than about one person’s journey back from Troy. It’s a story for all of us about leaving and returning. Homecoming carries that name for a reason. Just as immigrants cross oceans and continents then occasionally spend decades trying to find their way back to the place that first formed them, we too return. For holidays, weddings, funerals. The Navy taught me home is both a place you leave and a place that pulls you back across whatever distance you put between yourself and it.

My family of origin moved to northwest of Chicago after developers carved a subdivision from cornfields. Fresh sod covered the yards. Saplings stood staked in front of each house. Streets ran in a perfect grid, except for the two that run parallel to the northwestern railroad tracks into the city. Driving through my hometown now, those trees arch over the roads. Both of us grew up while I was away. Before the weekend’s homecoming game, white toilet paper still streamed from their branches just as they had back in my day.

Each visit becomes reunion and remembrance. As I drive through, I catalog what changed. My pediatrician’s office has since been replaced by a mailbox store. The movie theater is now a small park lined with memorial bricks. (My mother’s and father’s names are etched in those stones, a gift from family members after my parents died.) The local library holds its prominent place downtown, though Peepers the iguana who lived in its atrium has long since passed. He was this exotic portal that held entire worlds for us eight-year-olds checking out books about music and art and places we first learned about on National Geographic TV specials.

The reunion stretched across two days, which sounds manageable until you’re actually living it. I stayed in an Airbnb with my high school best friend, prom date, and two others who were classmates throughout my various terrible haircuts and worse decisions ages five to seventeen. It was a sleepover for late-fifty-year-olds who could afford good vodka.

Several of us toured the high school. Lockers had the same dents, which felt comforting and deeply weird, and entire banks are gone because students now carry books on school-issued tablets. Chiropractors should weep with joy at this development.

At the homecoming football game, our school’s fight song belched out of the recesses of my mind. The next night, our class’s homecoming queen (still gorgeous and one of the kindest person anyone can know) hosted everyone at her club downtown. It was packed with people we once knew everything about and now knew nothing about, or people we never knew and still don’t. Everyone talked at once. I kept migrating from one side of the room to the other, trying to hear anything over the roar of midcentenarians catching up on four decades.

Back at the Airbnb, my friends poured another round, and we talked about marriages that ended, our children who turned out okay despite us, our parents who died, the jobs we never saw coming or ending. Catching up on all those years of us having gone our separate ways.

Since graduating, I have lived many places. My sons are growing up in shifting landscapes, every home temporary. This town remains the fixed point on the map, a place that steadies me more than the ocean or pulpit ever will.

“Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness.” — Deuteronomy 8:2

The road has been long. Generous. Full of detours and laughter and loss and the quiet grace of finding the way home again (and again).

Gatherings like these allow us to walk through the same doors and see with eyes that have learned a few things. We meet the younger versions of ourselves, and if we are paying attention, we might offer them some grace. We understand that every path, no matter how far it takes us, bends back toward the place where the story first took root.