Comments on: Away We’ve Gone

By: Skyler Kressin

Skyler Kressin — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:52:08 +0000

Beyond the American cultural tendency to move from where you were born (and the economic considerations inherent in that tendency) is the reality that even if one were to want to stay near home, it may irrevocably change within a generation to something unrecognizable. I have lived in one city in southern California all my life, and I have seen my parents neighborhood transformed. No one who lives on their block now was born in the United States. When I was growing up, everyone had been. If I am to establish a place my children and grandchildren can call home, I am going to have to move, further perpetuating the cycle. Unless, of course, I doggedly refuse to care that I won’t be able to share culture, language, religion, and civic consciousness with those who live in my city.

By: William Randolph Brafford

William Randolph Brafford — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:10:15 +0000

When I looked into it, one branch of my family tree seemed especially loaded with preachers, missionaries, and doctors, and I think they had good reasons for moving to different places. They stayed true to a broad geographic region, but not to any one town. And the Presbyterian Church provided some measure of continuity. Furthermore, they kept telling their stories, and maybe that’s the best a person like me could hope for.

By: Becka DeSmidt

Becka DeSmidt — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:02:12 +0000

First, great picture of Jim. (He will always be Jim to me.)

Second, I was so absorbed with the attempt to relive my cross-country road trip vicariously through the movie, and distracted by all the depressingly/hilariously dysfunctional families, that the theme of placelessness that the movie is really about was almost pushed to the background. Thanks for reminding me — that does make it more poignant and the movie has a little more substance and significance for me now. (Although I guess I’m an outlier in terms of the family pattern, as my Grandma grew up in San Francisco and moved across the water to the East Bay, where my Mom and Dad now live, where I now live when I come home for the summer, and where I hope to return eventually, house prices willing.)

Third, how did you like the portrayal of college professors in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character, with her crazy comments about the practices of the “seahorse community”? So funny.

Loved this post!

By: Ben S

Ben S — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:10:57 +0000

Then you are a highly abnormal person from an even more highly abnormal family.

What do you base this comment on? I don’t think this is abnormal at all. I didn’t grow up where my parents grew up, and they didn’t grow up where their parents grew up. Only one set of my grandparents did grow up where their parents grew up, but they quickly left as soon as they graduated highschool. I think situations like this are largely the norm. Granted, I have no more proof than you do, but I know very few people who deviate much from this pattern.

By: flenser

flenser — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:17:12 +0000

Of course, that’s not an entirely new phenomenon. I can play that game with my family pretty far into the past: I didn’t grow up where either of my parents grew up. Neither of them grew up where their parents had grown up. None of my grandparents grew up where any of their parents – my great-grandparents – had grown up. I’m pretty sure the same holds true even farther back.

Then you are a highly abnormal person from an even more highly abnormal family.

By: Weasly Pilgrim

Weasly Pilgrim — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:58:19 +0000

Having a home is a hard thing in America, more a matter of work and effort and luck than a matter of inheritance or history.

So very true, although if you have an inheritance and a history to start with, you at least might know where and what home is and the longing for it might draw you back.

My wife’s family is clustered in south-central PA and traces its roots there back through many generations. Although Mrs. Pilgrim grew up in Upland, CA—her father was one of 17 children, so the joke goes that there just wasn’t room for them all in PA—she has never really felt at home there. Her parents always impressed upon her, for the most part unintentionally, that home was back East. It is no accident that all their children live in Pennsylvania, and that after 40+ years in the same house in Upland, my in-laws are considering a move back themselves.

In similar fashion, I grew up in the same house my father grew up in and in the same community as his father and his father before him, and so on unto the 9th generation. Though I have put down roots in the opposite end of the state, what I call home is southern Lancaster County, and I suspect it will always be that for me.

For both of us, home has a definite and particular meaning, a meaning given as a matter of inheritance and history. It takes a fair amount of effort to maintain those things and pass them on to the next generation, but knowing what we are shooting for makes it a lot easier.

By: Bob Cheeks

Bob Cheeks — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:50:39 +0000

“It’d been years since the kids had grown,
a life of their own
left us alone..”
John Prine
A sad tale you’ve told and me with one in San Antonio with three grandbabies and the youngest in Colorado Springs with three grandbabies.
Truth is, I’d go “back,” in an instant. Damn the air conditioning, T.V, automobile…all of it.
Very good post, Susan, you tore my heart out!