Memory Lane: No, they’re not there yet

AS it turns out, you can go home again, and you can even take your kids. You just can’t expect your kids to care all that much.

Many miles and years separate me from my hometown in Maryland. I’ve rarely been back since I moved to L.A. and, you know, I was OK with that. My parents moved to New Mexico years ago, and I am not one who looks back on my adolescent years, or pre-adolescent years, with fondness or even nostalgia. I’m still filled with gratitude each day that I do not have to wear a gym uniform or negotiate the blood politics of the school bus ever again.

But as proof positive that motherhood changes your biochemistry, I recently began rethinking the whole shake-the-dust-of-this-cruddy-town attitude I had toward my past. I wondered whether it might be nice to take my children, Danny, 7, and Fiona, 5, back to my hometown. To visit friends and family and walk them through the various landmarks of my life.

When presented with the idea, my children talked a good game -- about how much they wanted to see where Mama lived and where Mama went to school, where Mama almost got busted for smoking cigarettes in her best friend’s father’s car. (OK, maybe that didn’t quite make the itinerary.) They talked a good game because they are three-quarters Irish and they actually like flying on airplanes.

But when it came time to actually view these historic sites, their real-time interest was fleeting at best.

Driving through the quiet, early spring countryside, along fields frothed with cherry blossoms and wild daffodils, I tried to recall the desperate need for escape I felt when I was young. But all I could come up with was something like bliss. It was so beautiful here, so peaceful and amazingly unchanged.

Oh, around the rural roads leading to my family home, there were a few new developments, but miles still stood in wood and field, the landscape broken only by a farmyard, a red barn, a cluster of clapboard houses. Here was an America I had forgotten.

“Are we there yet?” Danny whined from the back seat. “This is boring.”

When the house finally came in view, the kids perked up. “Cool,” Danny said, as I pointed out the little shed my father had built, told them how every year we had to rake up all the leaves, how we built a treehouse one year and Uncle Jay fell out of it.

I drove up the road pointing out this childhood friend’s house and that one, the spot where I had fallen off my bicycle and gotten a concussion because I was going downhill “no hands,” the hill that was the best for sledding. And then I turned around, wanting to circle the house a few more times.

“What are you doing, Mama?” asked Fiona. When I explained she made a sound of impatience. “But we already saw the house,” she said.

And so it went throughout the town -- my middle school, my high school, the site of the communal garden that had claimed so much of my time, the town’s main street, our family’s church (now dwarfed by a new church so large and fancy it doesn’t seem real). A glimpse was enough for the kids, although they did appreciate an actual stop at Hoffman’s, a local market that still makes the best ice cream in the world.

At first I was actually hurt; they had seemed so thrilled at the prospect of seeing where I had been a child. But then I remembered that I was, in fact, the only adult in the car, and I know that nothing will kill a trip faster than a case of Expectations. And anyway, it was pretty funny. I hadn’t found it particularly interesting when I lived there, so why should they?

Children don’t start thinking of their parents as separate and possibly interesting human beings until they are much older than mine. I remember the moment I realized that the stories my father told about growing up in Chicago during the Depression were things that actually happened, just like things that happened to me. And I was a lot older than 7.

Many of the places, times and even people who are most important to us are one part reality and two parts memory. A visit to my hometown stirred up a chattering cavalcade of emotions in me; for my kids it was just another trip to another place where Mama knew how to find the best ice cream. Which, in the end, was just fine. We will build our own memories; we will have our own places. The house where my children grow up will mean something different to them from what it does to me or my husband; the neighborhood we live in will change in their memory, take on all sorts of emotional shadings that Richard and I will never see.

Meanwhile, my children, who found little meaning in the survival of the John Deere store or the old Carroll Theater, were impressed with Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pa., and the Mall in Washington. Just as I was, when I was that young.