The House....That Built Me
"I know they say you can’t go home again
I just had to come back one last time
Ma’am I know you don’t know me from Adam
But these handprints on the front steps are mine
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me”
The above lyrics are from the song “The House That Built Me“, a big hit for Country singer Miranda Lambert in 2010. The song is about a person who got completely lost in their success of their career and forgot who they really were…and has now decided to go back to their roots to discover who they really are.
The song achieved popularity because what it really did was touch on something we all go thru at one point in our lives….look at where we are and wonder how we got there. and if it’s not comfortable what can we do to get back to who we really are.
Sometimes it is hard to pinpoint any one thing that stops us dead in our tracks and makes us realize that we are a runaway train. For me the journey began last year after a conversation with a long time friend who called just to say hello. We had known each other for many years, followed each other from a distance, and occasionally touched base to reminisce. In the middle of the conversation, my friend asked how I was really doing, as if he almost sensed there was something amiss. What was initially intended to be a few minutes of catching up, turned into an hour of “friendly counsel”.
It was something that he had said in our conversation that had me wondering all day….who was I now and what had I become? Was the persona that people see in me every day, the real me, or one that I created to make sure I could reach the success I thought so important? And just how important had “success” become in my life? And it was the honest answer to that question which was the hardest pill to swallow. Looking in the mirror I didn’t truly like what I had become all in the name of “success”.
Funny how life can sometimes be such a smooth road, so much so that you put your “car” on Cruise Control only to be bumped back to reality by a set of giant personal potholes. Pretty soon you are going from a sleek cruiser to a rickety Pinto and wondering how you got there. You find the personal road map you are using is out of date and the left turn you took leads to an old abandoned road going nowhere.
Well…I found myself at the end of that abandoned road. And it was the small piece of imparted wisdom my friend gave me in that conversation that day which led me to where I am now. His comment? “Sometimes when you find you are on a Dead End Road, you turn around, go back to where you got lost and find the correct path.” And in the end…it was that bit of wisdom that spurred me on to create this blog “A Middle Childs Road”.
Like the person portrayed in the above song, I have often wanted to go back to the house where I grew up and look around. To touch the walls of every room, and let the memories come flooding back of the good times that made me laugh and the struggles that made me stronger. It may not have been, at times, the perfect domicile but for me it was home.
It wasn’t a very big house for a family of five, and many times it felt very crowded. But in that house is where some of my best memories were born. And the life lessons I learned while growing up there are still as relevant today as they were 45 years ago.
Our living room was the largest room in the house and it was there I would recall both celebrations and heartbreaks. It was in that room where we celebrated most birthdays and all of our Christmas’. It’s also where we watched the networks bring us Neil Armstrong’s Walk on the Moon, The KC Chiefs only Super Bowl Win, and sadly the news of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It’s where my Mom and Dad would inspect Report Cards, or sometimes dispense lectures to me after a day of mischievous behavior . It was in that room I experienced my first kiss and first broken heart. It was also a room of wooden floors sometimes laden with splinters which required the tender touch of a Mother to remove amidst all the tears.
I remember the kitchen and the formica table where my brothers and I would eat all our meals. Like all siblings it was either a place to discuss the “cool things” that happened that day, or the inevitable mini-DMZ where a Mom-prescribed truce seldom held up long. And the inevitable chore of washing the dishes of the day…..
There were only 2 bedrooms in our house, one for my Mom and Dad, and one for all 3 of us boys. And as you can imagine, it was all that you could picture in a boys bedroom. Hardly ever clean for more than 2 hours, it was full with 3 beds, one set a bunk bed and a single for the other. Most of the time my younger brother got the single bed because he was smaller and our parents were always afraid of him falling off the top bunk. My older brother and I took turns sleeping on the top bunk sometimes by choice and sometimes by parental selection. I remember one time being punished by my parents for kicking the bottom of the mattress so hard that my older brother flew off the top bunk and onto the floor. And I still remember vividly how hard it was for my Father to keep a straight face while lecturing me on how I could have hurt my older sibling, and how my younger brother Cody kept giggling and saying “do it again Mark, do it again”.
Our bedroom was also, like many young boys in my time, a repository for collected baseball cards and comic books. We would spend our allowance on cards trying to get a collection of the whole team and then store them away in a shoebox. We would memorize every player on every team and then picture them batting in old Municipal Stadium as we listened to the announcer call the game on our AM radios in our beds.
These are all good memories for me….but that is what they will always have to be for me. You see, the little house that my brothers and I grew up in no longer exists in actuality. I’m not sure if it was the wear and tear of time, or the many floods that hastened its demise, but at some point it was demolished. But the one day I drove thru my old hometown, I stopped and looked at where it used to be. And for a moment, just a moment, (like we sometimes see in a movie) I pictured the house with myself and my brothers running out to play with the voice of our parents telling us to be back in time for lunch/supper.
And then, in that same instant it faded into my distant memory…but the smile remained. You see, I learned the truth that we all come to know. That no matter what the ravages of time may foist upon the physical manifestations of our history, it can never erase the “house” that forever remains in our minds.
And it was that small revelation that led me to start this blog and reminisce with so many of you. And what started out as a simple homage to a small town I once knew, has also grown to include you, my old friends. It is your memories and mine of times growing up in Mosby and Excelsior Springs that, when I forget who I really am, bring me back to center. Each time I have written something I felt led to impart, so many of you have been kind enough to respond with encouragement and with stories of your own. And it is so many of those small memories that we share together that grounds me again…brings a happy tear to my eyes….and then makes me smile.
You see, for all the importance I tried to put on myself and what I think I have achieved in this life I remind myself that I’m still just a small town country boy at heart.
“You leave home and you move on and you do the best you can
I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am”
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could walk around I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me”
What really saddens me most of all about this journey I am making is that the friend who helped point my compass back in the right direction passed away a short couple of months after we talked. Now I won’t be able to share with him some of the things I have realized about myself and how a simple conversation reminded me that a facade only covers up the true person underneath it.
But instead I have you as companions….and I couldn’t be in better company.
