The first time I came home from California was in November of 1990. It was to be only one of three times over the past 19 years that I would travel back to Boston in the winter because the days got shorter and winter’s full unpredictable force could arrive any second. Through all the snow shoveling and wretched humid summers of my childhood, I could never imagine myself living on the east coast. The west held a fascination for me for as long as I can remember. What was out there for me was and in some ways still, remains a mystery. Often times I sit and think where my life would have taken me had my grandmother lived to see me grow up. Would I have had the courage to pack up and move? The answer is one that is hard to decipher. Wherever my life has taken me, I have made a family of misfits like myself. Some have come and gone, but a few remain and those are the people that I cherish above everything else.
I was discharged in May 1955 and it was one of the loneliness days of my life. After twenty-three months, basic training, school, maneuvers, being dead to the world, all the men became a family. Now it was over. On a clear morning, several of us piled into the open convertible that Gordon Landbe had to drive some sixteen miles to Killeen, Texas from Fort Hood. We stopped on a desolate corner, where stood a small brick building, a “hotel” with a name I do not remember. Along one side ran railroad tracks and what looked like desert.
Jumping out of the car with my duffel bag, I stood on the corner. The car turned around and started to return to camp. The horn blew and one of the others, known only as Biff, called out to me.
“So long, Doggy!”
I went inside and rented a room to await the morning train that would go directly to Chicago. One change there and it was directly to Boston. And Home.
My mother did not come to the airport when I arrived from my first year of my golden state tenure. Instead, she was where she always was when I was a child. In the kitchen, reading her paper. I walked up those stairs that my grandparents had teetered up so many times in the past, walked past the living room where the Christmas presents had overflowed, through the dining room and peered into the kitchen.
“Hey, there,” I said. “Anybody, home?”
My mother jumped out of her chair and, tears streaming down her face, hugged me with all her might. If my grandmother had been there to greet me - as I can imagine her greeting my father in 1955 – I’d like to think that the answer would be simply, no. I would not have moved at all.
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