Reunions, Time Travel, and Coming Home

Family. High school. Lost, then found. It turns out that there are more kinds of reunions than I had imag­ined. When I was a child, we had hap­py reunions with my dad when he came home from work­ing out of town. He and Mom were always so hap­py to see each other.

Then came oth­er kinds of reunions—seeing my grand­par­ents when they came back from their win­ter in Florida, run­ning to my grandmother’s house around the cor­ner with the mail I had col­lect­ed while she trav­eled, see­ing fam­i­ly when I came home from col­lege. And the best was reunit­ing with the boyfriend after being away.

Sometimes a reunion can be over­whelm­ing. Traveling back to the home­town is not a trip back in time but a slow walk through mem­o­ries. It is a review that floods through the back of the eyes, and brings forth sur­pris­ing mem­o­ries and feel­ings. The good and the sad and the hurt come in with­out log­ic and with no time­line. It is so unexpected.

How to deal with this? Mostly in silence, rev­el­ing in the good parts and shiv­er­ing at the hurt and sad­ness. The clos­er I got to the town, the qui­eter I became. My sis­ter, who was dri­ving, may not have noticed. Eventually, I told her I was over­whelmed with the mem­o­ries. But no way could I explain it. I could feel my shoul­ders and neck were tense, and I made a con­scious effort to breathe deeply and relax. That did not stop the memories.

I tried to take in the sights—what was the same and what had changed. My brain was jum­bled from what I saw and didn’t see, and from all the mem­o­ries. Some of those mem­o­ries I could do with­out, but there was no sort­ing them. The worst was the feel­ings. I don’t remem­ber ever feel­ing so many oppos­ing emo­tions almost all at once. It took until now to real­ize it was the feel­ings, not the mem­o­ries, that jum­bled my brain.

It was kind of like a pin­ball machine with lots of balls bounc­ing around and no one to play them.

This feel­ing is vivid in my mind now, but I don’t feel it now. A few days of activ­i­ties in the area added to mem­o­ries once hap­py but now sad because some­one is gone. Several some­ones are gone.

There was laugh­ter and sto­ries and jok­ing and cama­raderie with fam­i­ly and friends. New hap­py mem­o­ries were made.

But I don’t care if I nev­er go back.

And the finest reunion was walk­ing into my house and being greet­ed so enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly by my dogs.