Thoughts on a home town

I wonder if I should really be here sometimes instead of building my life back with the building blocks it has always been built with.  I miss Santa Barbara, that hazy glow of memories heats me up these nights when I regale people with my stories from home.  How we grew up – this holds the utmost importance and as I remember driving up State Street, or most commonly down, I remember these things and how time has gone by and now, looking back, or I guess looking forward, I think maybe I should be back there with these people who never left, making my life so my children can one day tell these stories.  If I don’t raise my children there, then what will happen to those stories?  What will happen if there is no foundation – if my children’s families don’t know their children’s families, if people who I have never known, like Mrs. Honey’s step-daughter who came to my going away party, will never come to their going away parties giving them things like hand made wallets?  These are the things that have built me, and when I’m here building something not wind-proof, not hurricane-proof, not fire-proof I think back to where my life has been and where my family is, not my blood family necessarily, but my other family.  My Petrini’s family, my Woodpecker park family, my Fiesta family, my Skateboard park family, my Hope Ranch family, my Santa Barbara family.  I grow a sense of progressive nostalgia for something that may never be there.  A sense that I may never have the thing that my parents grew for me if I don’t go back. 

If I choose to live this life I may never go back - if only for a rare holiday, or a rare funeral or wedding, if only for a rare event now and again. Those nights when we all happen to meet at the same bar, then go back to someone’s house for drinks afterward, then sneak into the same park we used to sneak into to smoke a joint, that is the time when I think that I will never grow old, that I want my children to experience that with these people’s children, but I know that thanks to technology, to airline tickets, to the fact that I might just as easily marry someone from Peru, marry someone from the East Coast, marry someone form Arizona, or from Northern California, that this may never happen.  This town will cease to be my town.  This sense of family gatherings, where my mother’s friends are the people that her siblings went to high school with - her friends are my friend’s parents whom I have known for twenty years, who she runs into in a grocery store aisle and who then re-attaches my sense of place to this world - that sense is gone because I have chosen this path.  When I go back and see at holidays that everyone still knows me because they know ME, they know how I lived, they know who I am because they were there, that is something I want for my family.  That is something I have never thought about before, but something I desperately want for my family.  Something I desperately want for me family. Am I finally getting tired of moving around?  Am I finally at this point, this mythical point of mid-20-dom where settling becomes closer on my mind than not settling?  I don’t know exactly.  I know that I would love to have a husband and a family and some pets and to be in a place where I can grow old and tell wild and crazy stories not only of my youth, but of their youth, and have those stories intertwined with the same people as my parents, as my cousins, as my grandmothers.  I am absolutely shocked at myself for writing these words.  I guess I miss that aspect of interconnectedness.  In a place where I find myself automatically connected to people and the connection is thin like fishing wire, I miss the times when I can go into a restaurant, sit down with a group of friends who know me to the core, say what I need to say, and have them not be twisted and turned by the elements of who I am.  I miss the times when I can reminisce with those same people going back years, and then sit with them in the same conversation and find out something new and fantastic that is happening in their life.  Time when I can sit in my mother’s kitchen, with my father in the backyard, listening to my dog bark at oncoming visitors, and know that whoever it is will know me, will know them, will be a comfort and not a distress.  This I miss, this I desperately want for my family.