Homeward Bound, Sort Of

This weekend I am going to visit my parents at their new home in Poughkeepsie for the first time. They moved there at the beginning of last month after years of longing to get out of Upstate New York. Okay, after years of my father longing to get out of Upstate New York. He grew up in Brooklyn, and like a homing pigeon, was always itching to get back down there. Poughkeepsie is just close enough.

I am just glad I have finally learned how to spell it.

I was completely absent from the whole packing up the old house and moving it downstate process. My brother helped, and one point I thought I would help, then suddenly I was in West Virginia, the old house was finally sold, the new house was purchased, and poof -- the childhood home where I spent all my years of conscious memory (we moved there when I was three, and I really don't remember anything about the house before) -- was gone. I would never step inside again.

My room, which at five I'd decided would have yellow walls and a red carpet (my parents were very into allowing us to make our own veto-proof decisions early on) was no longer mine.

The room where I'd angsted away my adolescent years, scrawling in journals, reading Beverly Cleary then Judy Blume then Sylvia Plath, listening to Cyndi Lauper then Debbie Gibson then Peter Gabriel then Depeche Mode on my sherbet colored "boom-box" from the mid-eighties, screaming and crying into pillows, reenacting my first slowdance and my first real kiss at fourteen-years-old (Yes, I did this. I put "Wind Beneath My Wings" on repeat, since that was the song we danced to, and I danced with my pillow next to my bed over and over and over again. Well into the night.) I think I had a few first attempts at make-out sessions in that room as well, but that phase of my later highschool years are a bit of a blur.

Of course, I have only been back to the house about twice a year since leaving for college -- maybe a bit more frequently while I was actually in college -- but in the past six years, rarely and only for a few days at a time. But it was still there. It was still mine.

It hit me one of the evenings of the first week of the run of my show in West Virginia. I was trying to reach my parents, couldn't remember the numbers of their new cell phones, so I called my old home number without really thinking about it -- the number, that for fifteen years, was the only number I'd ever identified as home. Since then there have been more numbers than even I can keep track of.

"We're sorry, the number you have called has been disconnected. No further information is available."

It's the end of an era.

I can't wait to see the new house.