Childhood towns & high school reunions

We travelled up the highway this weekend, to the town of my childhood. The town where I spent my teenage years. The town where so many firsts took place.

First love, first kiss. First tiff, first heartbreak. First job, first resignation. First cigarette, first drunk spew. For a lot of the people I went to high school with, it was also a case of first flight from the family home, first chance they had.

After years of this town being the location of our coming of age, many years of this being the centre of our universe and the place we allowed to define our place in the world as we then knew it, a lot of us left. Many didn’t, and they are still here. Some of them have kids of their own now, going off to the schools their parents attended and playing for the sporting clubs their parents did. Some of them paired up and became the most unexpected couplings, but that surprise is because of who they were then, and like me, they have probably changed a bit since we finished high school and mooched on to the next stage of this adventure.

Many a rural town escapee has made the kind of trip that I have this weekend. Truth be told though, this isn’t the first time I’ve made this trip.

Since I initially left nine years ago (a year after school let out), I’ve left once for a few years, came back for a year and then left again. That second departure was 4 years ago now and since then I’ve married and had my first child. A lot’s changed for me and so each time I do this trip, those tortuous-and-at-the-same-time-wonderful years of adolescence seem that bit further away. But this is the year of the big post-school milestone – the 10-year reunion – and so everything is magnified and seen through the muddy-glass question of “What have I done with myself and am I happy?” So this trip is one that begs me to stroll down memory lane as my car drives into town, meandering around that first bend and approaching the first supermarket, the one where I worked and earned my stereo, CD and alcohol money.

Consciously remembering your teenage years, to me, seems kind of bizarre, like picking a scab of memories and then wondering why it bleeds as it does. But we do it anyway. And we remember many things, but rarely everything at once. Rarely do we accurately recall the emotional context in which we acted back then. So we can’t objectively evaluate how we were then, but we do try, and that recollection is what we compare ourselves against. If you do it a few times, you can get a better idea of you and your life as it was, and so every time I make this trip I find myself remembering more of my earlier years and I add that to the mental papier mache me I have constructed in my head. It’s not a piñata, thankfully. For that much I can be proud.

The landmarks seldom change. They are the same bridges, water towers, train station dugouts and football ovals that once figured so prominently. Yet time has moved on and they have weathered a little, as have I, and we seem like strangers to each other. I wonder if the bridge remembers me, a mad man in a crazy-wheeled trolley, rolling down one side of it and smashing into the brick fence of the doctor’s car park? Does the supermarket remember the late nights and early mornings of counting stock and sweeping the front door entrance? Does the football oval recall the unco, tubby, pasty kid who had a bag full of dreams and a little toe’s worth of talent?

It’s pretty arrogant, I think, to suppose they do. I am one of tens of thousands of young people who’ve grown up in this town and my blood and my tears and my laughter is one of a million such things to be felt and heard and seen by this town. I am nobody super special and there are no plaques commemorating the day I swam from one side of the river to the other, so am not so precious to think I have left my mark on this rural town.

I sit on my mother’s back veranda, which was built after I left home – things have changed even here – and I can see the patches of lawn where I played cricket and footy with my brothers. I can see the trees planted over pets long gone. I see these things and I realise the grass has been mown a million times since then and the trees have given up fruit for many seasons since the pets slipped away from us.

It is humbling, to visit a place you once thought of as your kingdom, and see it no longer as yours, but as somebody else’s. You wonder then how many other people from earlier generations have thought the same things, and you miss your father and your grandmother – who both loved remembering things and telling you about them – and you wonder if they too had that moment of acknowledged insignificance and whether it was a happy realisation or a sad one. The romance though is that they are gone and you won’t ever know if they did or not. The towns of their childhoods would be hardly recognisable to them, they would not be able to point to many landmarks and remember.

So as the weekend comes to an end, I will shortly be driving away, back down the highway to where me and my family live. I will likely forget about this reflection and have a similar feeling next time I visit. Which will be November, for the reunion.

I hardly know what to be – excited or nervous.