You Can't Go Home Again

This was my Atari 5200 SuperSystem. I bought it at Crazy Eddie on Route 18 in East Brunswick on December 22, 1982. It took me 2 years to save up the $197, about $600 in today's money. It was the happiest day of my childhood.

I played it every day for over 5 years, until I wore out a second set of controllers. It hasn't been played since.

On December 21, 2020, 38 years later (minus one day), as part of my move, I gave it up. Even if it was still playable, and I could find new controllers for it, I haven't got a clue as to how to hook it up to a TV set, much less a present-day flat-screen version. And it took up too much space to be kept around as a conversation piece.

So I had to let go of a big piece of my youth.

I'm sorry, old friend. Goodbye. #Atari

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In moving, we threw out a lot of things. We found my father's degrees from Newark College of Engineering (which was folded into the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1975): Bachelor of Science, dated June 4, 1964; and Master of Science, from 1973. My mother saved his MS, because it was the higher-ranking degree, but threw out his BS, the document that made him a college graduate.

I knew I was a pack-rat. I knew my mother was: It pained her to get rid of National Geographic issues going back to 1969, just as it pained me to get rid of Sports Illustrated issues going back to 1980. I didn't know just how much stuff my father had saved that meant nothing to anyone but him. This included his NCE textbooks and other books related to his profession of mechanical engineering. It also included old magazines relating to his love of science, including science fiction.

My parents were always telling me to get rid of certain things, and I usually refused, clinging to the idea that they could be used again. This time, moving from a house that was decent-sized but old and too expensive to maintain to a condo across town, my hand was forced: We have half as much space. We paid guys to take away three truckloads of stuff.

Thomas Wolfe -- not to be confused with the later journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe -- died in 1938. (Tuberculosis. He was not quite 38, and this was before antibiotics, which might have saved him.) His novel You Can't Go Home Again was finished, but not published for another 2 years. It was essentially a sequel to his previous novel, from 1929, Look Homeward, Angel. In the later book, the protagonist has made a lot of money from writing the previous novel, but the residents of his hometown are furious with him, for portraying them as undereducated hicks, and he receives hate mail, including death threats.

In 2015, I went back to my old neighborhood. About a year later, I wrote this in this blog:

I saw my elementary school. It's in decent enough shape. I saw the streets I used to walk home on. They were always cracked, but now, more so than ever. The houses look the same, but the trees are taller, playing games with the perspective.

I saw the house where I grew up. The new owners have painted it a hideous color, not pink like you'd find on a 1950s Cadillac, but a weak salmon pink that should never be on anything.

I frequently have dreams that I'm back in my old house, but as old as I am now. I haven't been inside the house since we moved away, 25 years ago. And any desire I have to see that house, and that neighborhood, is, if not gone, then, certainly, satisfied for the time being.

I thought that this would mean the dreams would stop. They haven't. Only now, the dreams have changed. In one, the door that should have led to my old room led to a Dunkin Donuts. In another, the door that should have led to my parents' room led to a bookstore. Places where I find comfort?

Someone once said, "Nostalgia is a longing for a time that you didn't think was so great then." You tend to think that your youth was a simpler time, because "Absence makes the heart grow fonder."

A few weeks ago, during the process of moving back across East Brunswick, 2 neighborhoods away from where I grew up, I had another chance to visit the old neighborhood. Thankfully, the old house has been sold again, and the new owners have had it painted a nice light shade of blue.

A new strip mall has been built across Main Street from Bowne-Munro Elementary School, and the nearby Stewart's Root Beer drive-up restaurant has been replaced by an ice cream store, Scoop to My Lou. The Stewart's has moved to a strip mall 2 miles away.

Indeed, a lot of things in East Brunswick are still in business, but not in the same place. Bella La Pizza is now where Mickey's Donuts was. The East Brunswick Fish Market also moved.

As Ken Burns wrote for his Baseball miniseries, "Everything had changed, and nothing much had changed." Or, as the older saying goes, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

I don't want to go back to those days. I'm enjoying the Internet, my new hip, and the additions to my family too much -- even though I dearly miss the subtractions from my family.

One thing is for sure: I know damn well that the 1970s and '80s were not "a simpler time." Even then, I knew that the world around me was rough -- including the world close around me.

So, in spite of all the rotten things that have happened, now is better.

"You can't go home again." Fortunately, I don't need to.