Learning from the Past

Most of us remember a time and place from our youth that seemed perfect - a frame from our lives in which everything was just the way it should be - and we carry that vision on into adulthood as a fond memory.

For me, that time was 1960 into 1961 and the place was a small town in southwestern Virginia. We moved around a lot while I was in school - most of it due to my father's constant job changes. We began this process of moving in June 1960. My father and I spent the first few weeks at a boarding house on the town's main street and I began to get a sense of what life was like in a small town - and I liked it. The streets were narrow and lined with a tall canopy of trees that provided shade as the summer got progressively warmer. There was a slow, easy pace of life to the community. The center of town was the hub for the community, especially on Saturdays when families from the farms surrounding the town came to buy supplies. A university provided added an academic element to the town.

The rest of our family joined us in July and we rented the second floor of an older home. I started my sophomore year at a 300 student high school in which everyone knew everyone. I soon realized that this was the best place I'd ever lived. Between delivering papers, playing JV basketball, acting in my first school play and writing for the school paper, I felt like I had arrived. Seen through my teenage eyes, It was an ideal life. I was an average sized fish in a small pond and it felt good.

The sophomore year went by quickly, followed by a quiet lazy summer of swimming during the day and baseball games in the evening. It was a comfortable rut. As summer ended, a girl unlike anyone I'd ever met before started popping up at the same places I went. She was attractive and outgoing - she was different and to the point in expressing herself. Her quick wit caught me totally speechless more than once. The future for my Junior year was improving rapidly.

At the same time that my world was getting better, my parents' finances were getting worse. My parents decided that my mother was going up to Washington, DC to find a job with the idea that we would move to the DC area. A week later, she returned and announced that she had found a writing job in Washington. The grim reality was that she had not found a job. The other important piece of information was that she did not like the small town and knew that she needed to get back into the writing workforce to improve our situation. Knowing only that my mother had landed a job, the decision was made to move - quickly.

I cannot remember too many times in my life that I have cried any harder or felt any sadder. I was moving from what I felt to be Utopia and the security of close friends, a small school and the beginnings of the first real relationship with a girl that I had ever known.

We moved to Arlington, VA and I found myself starting in a 1200 student Catholic high school and working hard to keep up. I was suddenly a small fish in a much bigger pond. I adjusted and moved on. I still remembered the small town I'd left and almost hitch-hiked back there the summer I graduated from high school. Jobless and without a focus, I joined the Air Force and started creating my own life path.

Fast forward to a Sunday in the spring of 1981 - I was driving home from my youngest sister's college graduation on a stretch of highway I'd driven many times since going out on my own. The difference was, on that Sunday I had time on my hands. I passed a familiar road sign pointing towards the small town I had left years ago - that day, I decided to follow it. Driving into the town down the main street, I was amazed to see that nothing had changed - it was like going back 20 years in time. And yet, it was immediately clear to me that something fundamental was different. If it wasn't the town, what was it? As I drove and walked on familiar streets, it slowly dawned that it was me that had changed. This was the same town I had engraved in my mind at 17 and a lot of water had gone under the bridge since 1961. I was a different person and this was a different time. I stopped in the only place on the main street that was open - a bar, got a beer and looked through the phone book for familiar names only to find that there were none. I briefly toyed with spending the night and decided to drive on home instead. I picked up the interstate and headed south, reflecting on the experience.

That Sunday afternoon has taught me several valuable lessons over the years. The first lesson came to me as I drove home - we grow up and leave our homes to make our individual ways in the world. While this small town was an ideal place for a kid to grow up, it was not necessarily the ideal place to spend the rest of his or her life. A small town can be confining, insular and rigid in its view of the world. The only way to really learn about the world is to get out and explore it. What seemed to me to be the perfect existence at 17 appeared staid and suffocating to me as an adult.

As I've grown older I've also come to recognize that while my mother's deceit was hard to forgive, she invented the job out of the need to survive - as an individual and for our family. She did the wrong thing for the right reasons and ultimately we were better off for her courage. As adults, we do what we must to survive and hopefully, we do it honestly and ethically.

There will always be a spot in my heart and memories of that small town, its innocence and the strong feelings I had for that attractive, quick-witted girl. The biggest lesson from that time is that we cannot live in the past because it stalls us from enjoying each moment in the present and enthusiastically seeking our future. Sometimes, change may occur in a place; change must always occur in people