Home Away from Home

Dr. Robert B. Pankey

rbpankey@txstate.edu

I often wonder what it would be like to have a chance to go back in time to when I was younger.  How far back would I go?  Who would I want to see?  Where would I want to go? 

I was raised in a small town in Southern Illinois and have always felt that our fondest memories from youth rise from the place where we were reared.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like growing up in a

different town or location from year to year as military families do. We lived in a small but comfortable house by the movie theater.  It was close enough to the downtown area that we could find everything we needed within walking distance.  My mother would gather up the kids and take us shopping at the grocery store, dime store, and bakery.  We liked shopping at the dime store the best because we could buy a whole pile of toys and trinkets for less than a dollar.  The days were endless and weekends were filled with wonder and joy.   In the fall when the trees turned gold and red, our favorite pastime was raking up the fallen leaves from the big maple tree we had in the back yard.  We would stack them into a huge pile and lay on them, looking up to the sky through the limbs of the tree, gazing at the leaves falling toward us like snow flakes.  Yes, I’d love to go back to that home and shop and play like I did when I was young.

Peace comes from the simplest things we experience in life: falling leaves, shopping at the dime store, or just hanging out with my brothers.  We played games in the backyard without the help of parents telling us what rules to play by or who was to go where and when.  I feel this type of fun is not available to our youths today.  Kids just don’t get to play in an unstructured environment these days.  When school let out, we couldn’t wait to get home, take off our school clothes, get into our play clothes, and go outside.  Today it seems as though I can’t wait to get home so I can go back to work...on the yard, house, car, or computer.  We certainly had our priorities better established when we were children.  The greatest gift I could ever give a child would be the knowledge that while we are young, the best of times exists where we stand.

When my brother, Tom, and I went back to our old house before the city razed it to make room for a new Federal building, we found it partially torn down but still recognizable enough to remember what pleasures we had while growing up in that cold little house.  But there was something very different in the way the house looked to us.  The rooms were so small and the basement seemed so dark.  As we stood in the middle of the living room, I yearned to feel the comfort that I felt when I lived there as a child.  It occurred to me that I was looking at our home through the eyes of an adult rather than a kid only four feet in height.  So I got down on my knees, looked around, and there it was, that old house that Tom and I used to run through and play tag in.  There was the corner of the living room where we would stand those giant Christmas trees that sparkled with color and reflections of tinsel.  There were those markings on the doorway where our father would measure our height from year to year to see how much we had grown.  There was the high ceiling that my brothers and I used to try to touch by leaping to see if our legs were getting stronger.  As we rested there on our knees, it became apparent that those days were gone, and like everything, time had changed us as much as it had changed the house.  As we walked out of the back door, stepped down from that concrete stairway for the last time, Tommy and I both looked at the back yard, and there was no maple tree, and there were no leaves falling from the sky like snowflakes, and we were a little sad.

When I go back home to Southern Illinois, I always hope to see my childhood friends and catch a glimpse of those fall days that seemed endless when I was young and to find my boyhood memories of years ago when I had no fear or stress, and, most importantly, to see those wonderful gold and red leaves that fall from the maples and to remember how blessed I've been to have had such a childhood.

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