If you could "go home again," where would you go?

I’d love to go to the Seattle of the 1960s again. A Sound brimming with salmon. A small town ambiance. A pre-coffee, pre-grunge innocence.

I would walk along the water, in Verdun (Montreal) near the swimming pool. One summer when I was little, the fireflies were a blue-green color. Then I’d head to the variety store around the corner and con my grandfather out of candy. Perhaps he would make his “magic” lawn grow money for me…

@AlfredaPrufrock Great idea. I’d love to visit the neighborhood stores of my childhood with my few pennies that would go ever so far. I weighed those decisions like world issues. Or my Uncle Jack’s store in rural Georgia. He always gave us a coke—a sweet, real Southern coke.

GO back to where we lived on Long Island sound and go down to the dock to go sailing and hang out.

On the 26th this month my twin brother and I turn 40. We have not been home where we grew up from 3rd grade to graduating high school since.

We are planning a trip to see the places and take pictures of us in front or our house and schools. Visit the parks and where we used to work.

I’d like to go to my friend Shirley’s farm (that is no more) and go swimming in the pond together like we did when we were kids.

I’d also like to go back to before I was four because my brother who was two years older was still alive then. His death changed my family in ways I can’t even imagine.

I’d climb the roof of the junior high to see the “acid room” more often.
I’d use the teachers’ bathrooms even though I’m not supposed to.
I’d go hang out with the wood shop teacher at one of my old junior highs more. He seemed lonely and the place smelled good.
I’d venture down the hill from where I used to live and explore near the creek.
I’d go see my grandpa’s old house where I used to catch lightning bugs and keep them in jars as night lights.. with air holes of course.
... to name a few.

I’d go camping all summer at the lake we spent all our time at when I was a kid. Back then, the road out to it was still gravel and not many people knew about it. It was quiet, warm, serene, and oodles of fun. There were some people living on the lake, and one fellow had a small store in his garage where we’d go to buy gummy worms and ice cream bars sometimes. One end of the lake had a lovely sandy strip, and nearby were wild saskatoons, raspberries and strawberries to pick. There were plenty of rainbow trout to catch, as well.

The lake is still there, but now it’s a bit scummy from too many ski boats, it’s far too crowded and you have to watch your step because partiers throw beer bottles into the lake. The lake has lost it’s innocence. <sigh>

I’d go back to when I was a kid and helped my dad do things like clean the garage to get a dime to go spend at the candy store. And I thought at the time it was about the dime..

I’d revisit the drug store/soda fountain that was a few blocks from my K-8 school. Once you got to 6th grade in those days, lunch could be an off-school-grounds affair, and I would go to the soda fountain almost every day with my friends to read the teenybopper magazines and buy a Coke float if I had the money.

Every couple of weeks in the summer I’d go to a great bakery near my local library where I would buy a pain du chocolat and a small milk after I got some books. Then I’d go to the nearby park, read and have a snack under a great big maple tree.

I saw the path I took to the library and park (among other places) recently on Google Maps via Street View. That was an interesting experience. Nothing looked the same, and some places I remembered are long gone.

We weren’t allowed to go out of the neighborhood as kids, so one of the moms came up with a great idea to keep us busy. We made a booth like a ticket booth out of scrap lumber and painted it red and yellow. Then, once a week, she would take us to the store to buy $10 worth of candy. We would bring it back and sell it to the kids in the neighborhood at double the cost. So 5 cent gum was 10 cents. At the end of the summer we sent the money we made to an Indian mission in South Dakota. It was really fun. It took a whole week to get the booth made, then we made flyers to spread the word, then took turns manning the “store” on a corner. No one complained or called the police or anything like that.

@AlfredaPrufrock That sounds like a great summer. I love these stories.

I wrote a story about this, well, I started a story about this, but my plans were to go back in time and fix all the things I messed up. The reason I stopped was revisiting the past can do strange things to your head, and I wasn’t sure I was emotionally stable enough to go back down that road, even if it was in a semi-autobiographical novella.

I’m jealous of all these people with good memories of the past.

@evelyns_pet_zebra They aren’t always good memories, but memories we have made to be “good”. My father died when I was 17 and I really never knew what a fantastic father he was until I started revisiting the past.

Age 13: Highcrest Drug: Comics and donuts
Age 16: Highcrest Drug: Comics, Donuts and Smokes
Age 18: Hanson’s: Beer and Ted Nugent
Age 21: Bed: Either masturbating or just doing it.
Age 30: Lombardi Club: Friends, Food Fun cocktails
Age 35: Dining room: Hard days. hard (cheap) drinks
Age 50: AARP wants me, the local tavern can’t live without me and my boss is screaming that I have to sign a 15 year non-compete…So I wanna go back to Highcrest Drug store….for comics. Archie, please.

those are homes

My brothers and I used to go to the Red Rock Theatres in Las Vegas for matinees all summer long when we were growing up there. We also had a favorite park called Fantasy Park where they had an old locomotive, a spaceship, and several other unique items that you could play on.

Another favorite park was called Lorenzi Park where we took all of our swimming lessons (and first braved the high dive), learned to play sports, and had many family picnics and outings. Good memories.

The tiny pool in the neighborhood we lived in when I was about 11. It was so small I could dive off the diving board and swim all the way to the shallow end and back two and a half times without taking a breath! Mario’s Pizza, where we young teens thought we owned the place. We were so grown up eating in a restaurant all by ourselves. Ben Franklin’s Five and Dime and Afternoon Delight ice cream parlor all in downtown/oldtown Gaithersburg, Maryland. We walked all over that place :) The skating rinks (ice and roller) I frequented in my youth. Couples skating, friends and churros…sigh.

These mentions of penny candy remind me of a question I wanted to ask.

I’d go back to my grandparents home in Kokomo, Indiana. Many good memories there. They had cool pea gravel in the garage, I enjoyed playing in the refreshing gravel in a hot day. Grandma seemed to love me.

I would visit Sunset Drug Store in the heart of South Miami, which is no longer. It was a great place to hang out with friends, and the best grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate malts!

My granny’s old house that my pawpaw built with some friends. There was cypress all over the inside. The garden around her back patio had mimosas and snapdragons and roses.

A pizza place that was basically just a stand (there was a small “inside” area, but not much). They sold soda and slices and nothing else. It was right as you got off the Staten Island Ferry on the Manhattan side. Everyone would rush off the ferry. (Remember when New Yorkers were still rude? :^> ) We’d work our way to the front of the mass of people on the ferry so we could get off first and get to the hot pizzas first. If we ever lost our parents they knew where to find us.

Neither of these places exists anymore.

I guess i’d climb back into my mothers womb.

After living in Texas for 22 years, we literally DID come home. We own & are now living in the house my parents built when I was 3 years old. My grandparents’ house was next door. We had it torn down & we built a big addition on & renovated the old part. Tons of things have changed, of course, but a lot has stayed the same, too. We have a lot of family & friends here, so it was easy to come home.

I would go back to Buenos Aires where I was born. I would take my husband and daughter to experience it as well.

I took that trip, to my old school on the Welsh border. It looked so small, but then again I’d doubled in height since the last time I’d seen it.

Right now I’m travelling a lot, and visiting some favourite places. I guess the only place I might be going would be Adelaide. Though I’ve spent most of my life in Europe so I’m not really homesick or anything.

Lone Oak, I associate with the brothers (very old) who own the biggest farm in McCracken County. I want to turn it into a preserve. It is home.

When I was very young, the first place I ever went to (Besides my home in Rhode Island) is my summer home in Rhode Island where my grandparents live. It is a hotel. I love it there! Every summer I go there, and I surf (not the best place to, but whatever) and walk on the boardwalk and work at the hotel. I love it soooo much!!! Well, my biggest fear is the future as some of you may know from previous threads. Today, they are getting older, and thinking of retiring. This means that the hotel is gone. And they are seriously considering it. I have egged them so much not to, even to the point of “I’ll take over!” Nothing seems to help. They have put it on the market a year ago, and it never sold, so they took it off. thankfully This year, they are working there. It is hard though. I feel bad for them! They are getting old, but I want them to stay! My brother and I help, along with my Aunt and her friend. And it is a four floor, 50 room, motel/hotel.
What to do…What to do….
Me and my brother have already had LONG conversations about the future. To confess, I gratified a part of an ignored wall, so that I will leave my mark there. And when it is sold, I pray that they at least keep it similar to what it is [was], and do not tear it down or anything.
What to do…What to do…
What to do…What to do…

This is going to be odd, because the home I’d go back to was only a home for a year, and it wasn’t even in this country. My brother and I were going to a private school for the first time, and it was a very prestigious school (and even more so now, if you can believe it).

But the thing I remember most fondly is riding my bike to school every morning. I had bought my bike from the factory up North, and I learned how to ride like the natives. Weaving in and out of traffic, past the double decker busses, and riding down the High Street, past centuries-old buildings.

I learned to push my bike in that insoucient way, with my hand on the saddle, turning by leaning, ever so slightly, in the direction I wanted the bike to go. Playing rugby, cricket and field hockey, but not football (soccer) because that was beneath us. All the boys played football in the yard at lunch time, but that was unofficial.

A maths master nicknamed fag (he smoked a lot) and a french master who used his tie as a belt and forever had food stains on his shirt, but who taught us the meaning of existentialism with a live demonstration. He also took us on a long train ride across Europe to behind the Iron Curtain, in the days when that was a scary thing to do.

It was the most influential year of my life, and it’s the only one I can imagine wanting to go back to.

Stories, @daloon, wonderful stories! You must have at least six books in you.

Maybe @Jeruba, but you know it’s never about the stories. It’s about knowing where they begin and end.

But the truth is I can’t work alone, and, as you know. being alone is absolutely required for a writer to write. I can’t handle it. I need interaction with a live person. I need to see how it is going over. I need instant feedback, or I get lost and uncertain. Fluther is great because you know really fast if you’ve said anything worth saying.

I tell stories—before audiences, too, not just my kids. I even make them up on the fly, without knowing where they are going, or where they will end, and often they end up being very poignant, or picante or or touching or meaninfull—damn, there’s a word out there, or rather, in here, but it refuses to come out. My meds have made it harder to retrieve the words I want. It is so frustrating. And now, I can’t remember where I was going, so I think I’l just stop.

@daloon – Sounds like you’d love Toastmasters. :o)

At our local Northwest Folklife Festival that happens over Memorial Day weekend at the Seattle Center there’s a “liar’s competition” that’s really fun. It’s basically put on by a group of storytellers/writers and anyone can enter and get up and see who can spin the best tall tale in front of a crowd. Some of the finalist will have your sides aching from laughing. I think you’d love it. The feedback is immediate with the crowd interaction in the small stage/concert hall setting. It’s really fun and there are prizes and access to a beer garden afterward in the outdoor stages areas. There are all sorts of musical acts at the festival, too. It’s one of the annual shows we like to catch each year.

Yowsa! Too bad I live all the way across the country. I’m pretty sure that if there was something like that here, I would have heard about it.

I was surprised that we didn’t hear about it until we went looking at all the things available at the festival. It was such a hoot. It’s one of the lucky finds that taught me to go out-of-my-way looking for the fun stuff. Cheers!

answerbag online.. otherwise i am home lol

I am very nostalgic by nature, and often look up on Google Earth the places that have special meaning to me. I would go back to my grandma and grandpa’s house, 7237 Jackson Avenue, Hammond, Indiana, just to visit with them and maybe walk to the candy store. That house came up for sale about 6 months ago, and I would have been tempted to buy it, if it wasn’t that someone “remodeled” the hell out of it, removing everything that was neat about it. Gone are the old wooden kitchen cabinets with the scalloped edges, the porcelain countertop with built-in drain board, the huge double stove, the small rounded fridge, the fold-down ironing board, the laundry chute, the screen porch and glider, the claw-foot bathtub. Sigh….

That would have been awesome to buy the old place, if you could!

I’m here. My husband and I live in the home that I was raised in.

I would go back to the home where I was born. Even though my family moved when I was about 4 or 5, I remember a quaint house with an octagon window on the upper part of the house. The house was near an airport and very spacious.
@laureth GQ, It’s been awhile since you posted it, you should ask it again.
I’ll have another story to tell by then. tehehe

Eaton Canyon of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The homes were mostly leftover holiday bungalows from the late 1800’s and small homes through the 1930’s. No one locked their doors, every neighbor knew the other and would pitch together several times a year to clear brush, repair the less-than-single-lane road that wound through the canyon, plant shrubs for each other, watch each other’s kids.

Most people owned ponies, horses or both and so we kids would have big group rides together to dilapidated orange groves and an abandoned monastery. We climbed trees, waterfalls, hiked & made our own trails, explored plugged mine adits, dug huge pits, ran around naked in tall grass (being “natural”), blocked streams to make pools, collected antique junk from the streambeds and demolished old house ruins.

It was a great time to be a kid where we were, safe, secluded and surrounded by fantastic music, artisans, exotic foreign sportcars, bohemians who threw exclusive and fragrant parties.

Zambia.

Home, in my case, is not the place, but rather the person, and the way things were… </3 R.I.P. friend…

Hey, ya know everyboy’s talkin’ bout the good ol’ days, right?

I’m only 20, but I wish I could’ve lived my youth through the 60’s and 70’s…

Don’t worry though, I’ll make the most of the here and now, just rockin to some funkier tunes is all…

I’ll revisit this thread in a couple of years, when I’m living in Japan.
Might be sufficiently homesick by then to have some ideas… That’s my plan anyway =}

Back to my childhood home in Billerica MA, built 1807, a fireplace in every room [except the later added sun room]—The one in the kitchen taller than a small child and with the original iron pot and kettle still hanging there. A garage that was a converted stable and lots of interesting outbuilding connected to the main house. An acre of yard to play in. A giant elm with a swing suspended from it and apple tree, pear tree, grape arbor, blackberry patch and rhubarb. Toured by the ladies dressed like Martha Washington once a year or so.

In a heartbeat—but you can’t go home again—sigh

I would go to the Chinese restaurant that my father always brought me to when I was very young. We’d go almost every week. The hostess called me “Chinese boy” for some reason. The restaurant closed when I was twelve or thirteen, and I felt very guilty about it because my father and I had started going to a different restaurant that was closer to my house.

I’d like to go back to the small house on Valverde Street in Los Serranos, CA in 1959. I’d try to make things right for all the trouble and heart ache that I caused back when I was 7. The house is still there. I saw it in a a satellite picture. All the people though are surely gone with the wind.