Chapter Summaries

PART XII

You Can't Go Home Again

Chapter 47

A TRAVELER'S EPILOGUE

 

I walk around my hometown.  Just as George Webber found in Lybia Hill, I discover that even the streets of little Ridgeway are "foaming with life, crowded with expensive traffic, filled with new faces he had never seen before." – a real estate boom is on.  But it is not the "madness" that George saw in people’s faces that I see, rather it is the pervasiveness of vibrant growth – the sights, smells and sounds of new construction.  It is all very good, but it’s lost on me because I have returned home heavily in debt.  A home of my own, again, becomes only a dream.

People haven’t changed much. Many are still leading "lives of quiet desperation", still spinning their wheels in the same lamented ruts, except that some have moved or simply redecorated their ruts.

I do enough to keep the semblance of a roof over my head and creditors at bay.  Memories of the Odyssey flood like tsunami and draw me back in the riptide.   I undertake the enormous task of assembling and collating all the journals and artifacts of the journey.

It is also a time of self-appraisal.  Alone, I wander my old training grounds: the beach at Abino Bay, the abandoned railway line, the Point Abino Lighthouse.  I ask myself: What have I learned from my travels?  Did I accomplish what I set out to do?  How has my outlook on the world changed?  Do I feel like a better person for it?  Having done it, would I change anything about it?  And what of home – have I truly come home again?

Home.  In the lyrics of Neil Diamond’s "Heartlight", a musical tribute to E.T.,  it is so true that "Home’s the most excellent place of all."  But I ponder Thomas Wolfe’s conclusion that you can’t go home again.  Was he right?

You will have to read the whole story to find out....

The End

(is just another Beginning)

Midi music: love theme from
St. Elmo's Fire

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