Going "Home"

I watched the PBS (edited) broadcast of a remarkable 1969 documentary on Tuesday evening - Johnny Cash: The Man, His Music, His World. There were a number of moving scenes. Johnny and June singing Fever at a prison; Cash and Bob Dylan recording a duet; Johnny singing the

Ballad of Ira Hayes

(the native American who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima but died an alcoholic) in front of a group of headdressed Indian chiefs. But one that interested me at this point in my life (and this past week as well) was when Johnny is back going through the sharecropper's shack where he grew up. He walked around the house, looking and commenting. He walked into the house and commented that the rooms seemed a lot smaller.

What struck me was the way I had been doing some of that the past few days with my 60th birthday. I had to drive up the main streets of town where I grew up commenting on what had changed- and what hadn't. I even had to drive around the corners where my boyhood home and my aunt's house were. "Gee, the streets seem smaller." "The back porch is still the same." "They moved the back door."

Is it some part of human memory that makes us desire to do that in some way or another when we move beyond those days? Is that a part of having a "home"; roots where we hope things will always be like they always were, especially for those of us who have moved away? Intriguing, to say the least, to watch Cash do at age 36 what I was doing at age 60.