Tim and I were talking about the concept of “hometowns” a few days ago. Being an Army brat, I never felt that I had a hometown. Even though we mostly stayed in one area during the last seven years of my public school education before I left for college, we lived in three houses in three towns and it involved three schools.
My father did have a hometown, however, a place where he came from two families whose ancestors had helped found the town. He grew up knowing everyone and everyone knowing him, and he had a lifelong best friend. When he left the Army after World War II, he went back to that hometown. I’m not sure exactly what he did then unless it was to try forgetting the unforgettable, to learn how to live again within the embrace of a family who loved him, and to breathe and survey a familiar landscape.
His best friend was Jess, and since this photo doesn’t have names on it, I’m assuming this is Jess (on the left) with my father. It’s dated, so I know it was taken the year my father married my mother, possibly taken by my mother. Four years after it was taken, my father was in school at Alabama, he and my mother had a three-year-old and a five-month-old, and Jess died when he wrecked his car on a country road outside their hometown.
My father rarely told stories about the friends he lost in war, but he did talk about Jess. It was a loss that always stayed with him.
Trying not to name names here–don’t want to get anyone in trouble!–but I was recently in a conversation about the impatience of the young for the elderly. My friend had read an online account of someone who was beyond exasperated about having to wait in line at the grocery store while a senior wrote a check. She ranted about old people shopping, about not using debit cards, etc. This person’s diatribe appalled my friend enough to make her write a satirical response, in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which probably went right over the enraged shopper’s head.
Yes, we live in a fast world, and yes, it’s sometimes populated by people who don’t and can’t live at a fast pace. But when I see old people, I think of the infinite stories of their lives: their triumphs, their losses. Their great loves and heartbreaks. All the experiences that make up the few decades they get on this planet. And even if they never travel very far from their hometowns, the journeys they’ve made with their hearts have been a long adventure as noble and perilous as any we read in books or see in movies. The least we can do is show a little courtesy when they move more slowly than the rest of us. Because actually, we’re only rushing toward the same place where they’re living.
On the most recent episode of Lifetime’s 
