Day 12

October 31, 2007

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.
Sam Ewing

Halloween. Today I wanted to do something good for someone else. To direct a little of my energy outward instead of inward. To begin to square up some long forgotten accounts in my own bank of Karma. I volunteered at a halfway house for convicts who are in need of psychological services, and this journey took me to one of the worst neighborhoods in my city.

I walked past the little children trick or treating, and observed that many of them could not even afford costumes. It broke my heart in a million pieces. I wanted to take these kids in. To give them what I had. To help shape and steer their lives. I wanted to make life different for them.

But even part of this is a lie. Much of what I was really mourning was the loss of my own childhood. Stephen Foster once wrote, "No matter how far we travel or what sadness the world imposes on us, all our hearts ache for the best memories of childhood, the security of a family and parents, and the familiarity of a home." Although our hearts ache for these things, the reality of childhood is for many people a different experience. What we are often mourning is sometimes not our childhoods themselves but the idea of a childhood that was unlike the one we actually experienced. That's what seeing those kids conjured up. They were a reminder of false memories and unrequited longing. Childhood for them is likely not a wonderful time of innocence. Not here. Not in this neighborhood.

Reconstruction is often about acknowledging loss. That's the key question in most people's lives. What have they lost? Many of us mourn a youth we misremember and possibilities we never explored. We are not mourning the experiences of youth but rather the lack of experiences that we never quite had the courage to explore. But alas this time is gone. We can't go home again, and often we remember a version of home that was really not there to begin with.

Somehow these tears are oddly cathartic, and help me purge some memories of my unhappy childhood. Acknowledging I'm missing a youth that never happened helps me avoid excessive sentimentality which is a favorite past time of many alcoholics. It also gets me thinking of the time I have left, and how these can be authentically good times. If one can believe in the possibility of joy anything is possible.