Home Again, Home Again

To market, to market, to buy a fat hen,

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

To market, to market, to buy a fat hog,

Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.

When my mother used to sing all the verses to this Mother Goose rhyme to me, neither of us knew it actually came from 1598 (if not before), from Florio's A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English. As a very young child, I simply liked the rhythm and the rhyme, and how I felt when being bounced on maternal knees.  

Whee! One never forgets those moments of jiggety-jog, never. 

I wonder if children nowadays are growing up without Mother Goose, and hope my fear is baseless. Mother Goose, through the verses just mentioned, introduced me to the word home and I never got tired of it. For years I knew where home was, what it was, who was in it, and how I felt about it, despite its defects. The center of the universe.

That has all changed now. The ones who lived in my home with me or the ones I lived with in our home (it doesn't matter how we put it) are no longer there. It is an emoty space as far as I can tell.

Still, I have such a longing to go home, and in truth I have walked through the house's many rooms every day since I shut the door behind me for the last time. Why do I want to go now, and still? There's this sudden feeling that I have to, must go. There's a need to retrace steps in order the keep the memories from fraying and graying around my edges. Without them, the memories, can I really be?

If I forget everything, let the memories slip through my clenched knuckles, I fear I will become homeless. That thought terrifies me. And the humming starts.

I want to go home, I want to go home, gee how I want to go home… sang Bobby Bare in 1963. He really insisted on it, too. In the lyrics he was in Detroit and longing for the cotton fields in the south. I've never been to Detroit and have no yearning for cotton fields to be honest, but that doesn't mean I don't want to go home as badly as Bobby did. Probably more, because in his song he says maybe he'll swallow his pride and catch a train back to what he left behind. He had the option.

No train can take me back, but gee how I want to go home, Bobby. If not by train, by some other means of transportation... 

(more humming)

So hoist up the John B's sail see how the mainsail sets

Call for the captain ashore let me go home

Let me go home why don't you let me go home

Well I feel so homesick I wanna go home

That won't work. There's no train home and there's no sea for a ship. It doesn't matter if Johnny Cash and then the Beach Boys sang the song, with different titles and very different styles. A ship just won't cut it. No, not to cross from the Atlantic coast where I live now to the western side of New York. The Thruway doesn't allow boats of any kind unless they are on a trailer with wheels.

I need to work on this some more if I'm ever going to get there. Hum louder.

Country roads, take me home… to the place I belong. Oh, John Denver, you made all of us think we were from West Virginia. Well, I visited the state once or twice, but I don't miss it. I am thinking, though, that it takes a lot of driving through the country to get to my home, so perhaps driving is the best way to travel. I'll have to make sure my car can handle the distance. Might need an oil change, need tires checked, things like that.

I'm ready. I'll take some music.

And each town looks the same to me

The movies and the factories

And every stranger's face I see

Reminds me that I long to be

Homeward bound

It's true. The towns have very little appeal in mid-New York State. Even less of it near my home town. Some places should have been razed and rebuilt decades ago, but I suppose the people living their dingy lives there aren't aware of the holes in the walls they reside in. Fortunately, my town was several cuts above the rest, at least in my opinion, which is the one that matters here. Simon and Garfunkel did a good job on this song back in 1966, so I'll probably be singing along with them on my journey back.

Get back, I hear the Beatles start in on me, right close to my ears... definitely not me singing...

Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner

But he knew it couldn't last

Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona

For some California grass

Get back, get back

Get back to where you once belonged

Get back, get back

Get back to where you once belonged

Get back Jojo

My name isn't Jojo and I never heard of anybody with that name, even. However, I like the message of the song that tells the country fellow to stop thinking the city has something to offer. Or that California has something to offer, even. I'm an Easterner, and we don't take kindly to the west coast. There's nothing out there but earthquakes and the Pacific. Not that deserts have much to offer either, in my opinion. I have very strong preferences.

Get Back might have been sung by the fabulous Beatles, but I don't need it on my trip back. It's probably the Arizona-California thing and all that "westness" they both have.

You can’t go home again, a voice whispers, and it doesn't seem to be a song, but one never knows. Then I realize it's Thomas Wolfe, or more precisely, George Webber, who is the main character in the novel from 1940. The novel whose title has just been whispered to me. You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. 

Why won't Wolfe leave me alone? This is too upsetting and undermines all my plans, my good intentions, my hopes...

At least let me try to make it back, to get back to where I first learned about my world. Knowing full well it's impossible and all the songs I called up are for naught, is not helping at all. It means I can't sing my way back and that is causing infinite pain, you know. Or maybe you don't.

Let me tell you what that means in my case, why I really can’t go home.

The reason is that my family will kill me if I do, or at best will maim me, give me a severe concussion, rob me blind.

Why? That is impossible, you say, but it's true. If they don't kill me, they will aim to do some serious damage. Broken bones would be a definite possibility. Or getting run over or into by a motorcycle or car. I don't think I'd get knifed, but in any case would need to go around looking everywhere lest I find a knife in my ribs or back. There would also be a whole lot of nightmares, probably incurable.

It's all because I learned to read but the rest of my family didn't. I liked school. My family didn’t read, and thus they all had small brains and lived in a fantasy world created by lotteries, TV channels for selling things, the national anthem. By fantasy world I mean dream world, the one where the American Dream creates individuals who think the world owes them a living and lots of Big Box stores.

Family members would give Dollar Store praying hands or stuffed animals from China to my mother when she had one of her bad spells. If I wanted to be blunt, I'd say they were dirt, are dirt, but somehow they lived ethical myths like ‘family takes care of family’. Coming from them sounded like a Sicilian philosophy. If not being blunt, I'd just have to say we don't think alike and leave it at that.

You probably think I'm exaggerating or have a good imagination. Well, you should know I am not stupid and I know what they would look like when I arrived and how they would approach me. It would be exactly like the Walking Dead. In an instant I would be surrounded, growled at, clawed raw, then eaten alive.

Yes, Thomas and George, you are right. I can't.

Unheimlich comes to mind now, because this is all so uncanny, so strangely familiar. The image of some walking dead people threatening me in my home (or rather outside it because somebody else whose name I don't know lives there, so we can't go in). More than threatening, as already noted: they would be jabbing at me, biting off chunks of my flesh, ripping out my intestines. 

Freud wasn't the first to talk about the uncanny in his 1919 essay; before him was Ernst Jentsch's 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. After Freud came Lacan with his seminar on L'angoisse [Anxiety] in the 1960s. There have been others. Unheimlich: when it is unlike home, is lacking a home, is strange and unnerving. That is what is starting to happen here. No home, no comforting past, no feeling of the familiar. 

My nerves are afloat.

So I really don't want to go home, I guess. I can't, and I really don't want to. Why should I? Well, there's the matter of refreshing or rebooting all the memories of a happy childhood. Not a small reason.

Did I think I wanted to get objects in order to remember those memories? That is obtuse. Like the persons, the objects are long gone. There are none to be had. Objects are actually worthless. They hold only themselves, occupy only their own space.

Did I think I would see what I can already see in my head?

Did I want to relive the past, walk the streets of my hometown again like a twelve-year-old? The twelve year old's mind is not the one I have today. 

I think all I wanted was a road trip, an excuse to roll the window down and blast music along the highway.

Home is here, in this small house where I have re-homed my first, longer home. The here home is yellow, like the re-homed home, so it's kind of an homage as well as a sign that I still like yellow.

Now that I don't have a twelve-hour drive to make across a sealess New York, I have time to relax and think I'll put on some music to listen to while having a cup of lavender tea. 

I don't understand. Somebody has come up with an uncanny playlist. It might have been me.

My Blue Heaven. Well that's an ancient song. Nowadays nobody has heard it, which is to be expected because it's from the 1920s. Written by Walter Donaldson, it was quite the hit. However, crooners like Gene Austin aren't exactly the rage now, so the song will probably fall into oblivion in the next ten years. 

A smiling face, a fireplace, a cozy room

A little nest that's nestled where the roses bloom

Just Molly and me

And baby makes three

We're happy in my blue heaven

Nobody even knows who Gene Austin is. I even had to look him up on the internet. The song also sounds corny in his version. The better one was sung by three people in my home when I was a girl. Two of them are gone, though.

Home, home on the range... images of television screens in black and white, dry lands with mournful tumbleweeds. A lunar landscape, the wrong kind of rural. Cowboys who always looked lonesome and handsome.

Sweet home Alabama

Where the skies are so blue

Sweet home Alabama

Lord I'm comin' home to you

That one must have gotten on the track by mistake. It was never danceable, plus Alabama is even farther from my mind than West Virginia or Arizona. Hot and muggy. Fast forward.

Home, by Sheryl Crow, comes on now. It's about a relationship with one man only and how it has faded away, but the part I'm taking out of context is the refrain:

This is home, home 

And this is home, home 

This is home

I'm liking the insistence on having a place and being in it, not longing for what is no longer open to us.

My Home Town. Oh, Bruce Springsteen, how it hurts you to remember your rough New Jersey town. The one you grew up in is not what I knew as home. Unfortunately, my place is today not so different from yours. Probably neither of us needs to go back any more. We brought our roots with us and can remember them here where we now live. Don't fret, Bruce: look at you; you have it all.

Homecoming by Kanye West comes on and to the questions of the song, I add my own, my echoes. Humming: Only this, and nothing more. Does home remember me? The house, the town, the street, the barn that was burned down? Does anybody think about me? What if I had gone back and found they had all forgotten me? All, except for the family zombies, that is. I want to ask, just like you, Kanye:

Do you think about me now and then?

Do you think about me now and then?

I want somebody there to think about me, but they are no longer there. No use going to find what I already know.

Who says you can’t go home? asks Bon Jovi, who seems to still be an idealist. You have it all, too. Don't try to live in the past.

Home is where the heart is now emerges from the speaker and it's a chorus of voices singing the chorus, kind of like the home within a home I mentioned earlier:

Home is where the heart is

No matter how the heart lives

Inside your heart where love is

That's where you've got to make yourself

At home

Elvis, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Lady Antebellum, Firebrand, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Lynrd Skynyrd - I'm sure I've left out a lot of names - are all telling me to come in, to make myself at home in this house where I live. The other home, the first one, is empty now because I've moved everything that matters to this one. I hear what they're all saying:

... you've got to make yourself

At home