Wistful

Had a dream last night that I was back in the art building where I went to college. It was completely different but very cool. All the windows were floor to ceiling and there were two to four person studio spaces on each floor. There was SO damn much interesting, hip-as-fuck art everywhere.

Here’s the thing—I knew absolutely no one. Of course I didn’t—it’s been more than 40 years since I graduated and left that no longer little town. The professors I had are undoubtedly all dead, or close to it, by now. At least two of my studio friends are gone already—too young. Other fellow students are spread across the country, the world even. In the dream I was an alien in a place that, at one time, felt like home.

What’s this mean? I’m feeling a bit like George Webber, Thomas Wolfe’s protagonist—I can't go home again.

He is a changed man yet a hopeful one, awake to the knowledge that one can never fully “go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…away from all the strife and conflict of the world…back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time." (source)

Unlike George, I was hellbent on leaving my conflict riddled, often violent family home and the town where we lived. My memories from then and there are, mostly, not warm or pretty. So what am I feeling wistful about? The happy, fulfilling time I spent in the art building with Kevin, Myla and Scott, that’s what.
I leave you today with a few more wise words from You Can't Go Home Again:

Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.
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...America went off the track somewhere—back around the time of the Civil War, or pretty soon afterwards. Instead of going ahead and developing along the line in which the country started out, it got shunted off in another direction...Suddenly we realize that America has turned into something ugly...and the worst of it is the intellectual dishonesty which all this corruption has bred...People are afraid to think straight--afraid to face themselves...We've become like a nation of advertising men, all hiding behind catch phrases like "prosperity" and "rugged individualism" and "the American way." And the real things like freedom, and equal opportunity and the integrity and worth of the individual...they have become just words too.
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He saw now that you can't go home again—not ever. There was no road back.
~~~
His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.