You Can't Go Home Again...

... but sometimes you can revisit a place that was magic three decades ago, and you find out the magic is still, crazily, beautifully, still there.

Today, my brother Scott and I took Nate to a minor league Phillies game in Reading. It was a blast. On the way back to my brother's house, he mentioned that the campground where we used to go to my dad's company picnic was nearby. To me, it was like saying, "Yes, the North Pole is right up the street. Do you want to go?"

No pictures exist from those once-a-year company picnics. The pictures are only in memories, shared stories between my many siblings about that one day each summer where we would excitedly wrap our bathing suits in our towels and head to... well, I didn't know where back when I was little. It seemed very far away, in the middle of the woods somewhere, and we looked forward to it as much as we looked forward to Christmas.

THE COMPANY PICNIC!

I didn't think that place could still truly exist... even though last year my sister told me the name of it and I found it online. It remarkably does still exist and operates as a summer day camp. But to GO there? Over 30 years later? With my son, who never got to meet my dad, his Grandpa Skip?

But Scott found it, and we went. No one was there except the man mowing the grounds. The place was smaller than I remember. The walk to the barn from the picnic tables so, so short now as an adult. But the place still existed, in the midst of strip malls, drug stores, banks, condos, junk. There it all was.

I walked among ghosts and the sound of laughter, and the echo of memories of summers gone by. My brother Scott and I showed Nate the barn where the dancing took place, and I showed Nate the field where I once won first place in a race. Then Nate ran on that very same field. I said hi to my dad, who died 29 years ago and who never got to meet even one of his grandchildren. Nate then said hi to Grandpa.


There's the barn, Nate...we partied hard there in the 70s! Well, except I was 8, but I felt like I partied hard.



Nate and his awesome Uncle Scott.

The same lake that we used to take rowboats out on decades ago.

Nate runs across the same exact field that I ran on when I was 6 years old or so and won my first and only "medal" (a silver dollar) in anything remotely sports-related.

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?" So asks Emily in the play Our Town, after she has revisited her twelfth birthday. The Stage Manager answers that humans indeed do not realize life, except for perhaps the “saints and poets, maybe.” Sometimes when you go back to a memory it can be so disappointing. But not today. Today I felt my dad all around us, and I really felt like he would have been an amazing grandfather and pretty chill dad if he had been given the chance to live past 50.