I just recently got back from 5 days in Indiana. Good friends, golf and county fairs. I wrote the following sometime back but it certainly fits with my feels of being in Indiana recently.
LA
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Just some thoughts:
I thought happiness was “Lubbock, Texas in My Rear View Mirror.”
I was driving Mac Davis one morning to a golf course. He was the one who wrote and recorded that song, so I asked him about it. He smiled and said, “Well probably most all of us, at one time or another, has that thought about their growin’ up place.” “What about you?” He asked. I smiled and said “Yes.”
Country music singer Mel Tillis said something to the effect, “The first eighteen years of our lives we are workin’ to get away from there, and then we spend the last years of our lives tryin’ to get back there.” There is some truth in that statement.
In Tom Brokaw’s book, A Long Way from Home, he describes how he had some of those feelings. In 1962 he left his home state of South Dakota determined to find a faster paced life and get beyond what he called the rhythms of small towns and rural culture.
“I thought that the influences of the people, the land, and the time during my
first twenty-two years of life were part of the past. But gradually I came to
know how much they meant to my future and so I have returned often as part
of a long pilgrimage of renewal.”
Personally I left my home area of Indiana a bit later than Brokaw left his South Dakota roots. After graduating college I stayed in my home state of Indiana for about thirteen years. After that we moved to Tennessee for three years and then we spent the last twenty-four years before retirement living in New Jersey, about thirty miles from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, New York City. Now we have been in the greater Nashville nearly 15 years. I have also carried some of those feelings Brokaw describes in his book.
“I don’t want to move back, but in a way I never want to leave.
I am nourished by every visit.”
(Tom Brokaw: A Long Way from Home)
True, I don’t want to move back, but in some ways I have never left.
You?
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June 21, 2014
Keep on,
Larry Adamson