Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "going-home-again"

Sweet, strange day. Saw my first hometown Tigers game in 34 years, and my first with my son, sitting in the upper deck with Detroit framed so beautifully in the sunlight streaming past all that green beyond the outfield fence, it seemed almost possible to believe there was still a city out there. Or will be again someday. Then back to the 'burbs, to show my boy the little yard on the tight, grassy corner where I used to play whiffle-ball hockey with my Uncle Jeff, and hide-and-seek with everyone, in the company of one of the brothers we used to play there with (and HIS sons). After that, to the house we moved to later, with the birch trees and the evergreens, the bus stop at the end of a driveway at the end of the block, the basketball hoops in driveways, the house through the trees up the little hill which I would one day transform into Theresa Daughrety's The Snowman's Children house,



the weedy, reedy lake where we swam, with the deck off the scraggle of beach that my dad built for the whole neighborhood to use. Still there. The roads not dirt anymore. The place not the one in my memory. At least not sunlit like that. Then back to a nightlong dinner and gabfest with almost the entire family from that house behind ours, plus all of their families, the stories we always retell being retold once more, riper and older, sweeter and funnier. And sadder. Or maybe I'm just aware of being away from the home that is my home now for a little too long...