You Can’t Go Home Again

The last place I lived before planting myself in Columbia was a Baltimore County neighborhood called Rodgers Forge, which is a five minute drive from Towson State University and (downtown?) Towson. I haven’t been back much. I haven’t really had a need to.

That made last night’s “road trip” to Raising Cane’s in Towson something of an adventure. My recent college grad wanted to get out and do something. Was I going to turn down an offer for a drive with my kid and dinner at a place I’d been reading about on Twitter for weeks? Of course not.

There’s something about returning to a place that you haven’t seen much of for over twenty years. All the changes feel so sudden. Entire buildings have sprung up. Whole sections are missing, or different. Roads have been rerouted. I felt myself looking at it with a sense of curiosity and detachment. Think of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock with one eyebrow raised.

Fascinating.

The layout of Towson remains one of the weirdest and most counter-intuitive of any place I’ve lived. I don’t think it could be fixed unless they tore the whole thing down and started over. I was living there when they put in the roundabout at the center of town. For one brief time period at the start, everyone approached it with such trepidation that the traffic experience there was peaceful and civilized. These people had never encountered roundabouts.

Once they got the hang of it, however, it was back to Grand Prix meets Roman chariot racing. 

About last night. The stretch of York Road from the library up to the roundabout is far more colorful, wacky, and gaudy than it used to be. I loved it. Like it or not, Towson is a college town. I don’t know how many students are regularly walking into town, though. Is it walkable? Maybe a lot of them have cars. 

Speaking of cars. We parked in a parking garage and received a validation ticket from Raising Cane’s. Otherwise the first ninety minutes would have been eight dollars. Pay for parking? Such a thought Columbia/HoCo would cause horror and dismay. Almost the first objection to anything new here is that it might make it more difficult to park.

I’ve bookmarked this article to read later because I feel like I could stand to learn more on this topic.

Why free parking is bad for everyone, Joseph Stromberg, Vox

I think it can be educational to observe change in places we know that we don’t have intense emotional attachment to. It’s easier to to maintain that sense of curiousity with a bit of detachment. In one’s own “home place” the changes feel personal. Your emotions come to the surface far too quickly. How easily we  arrive at “this means war!” over each new proposal.

Last night in Towson I found myself able to take in all the new sights more like a student. I found myself thinking, “Well, that was an interesting choice,” at changes I was startled or put off by, rather than being consumed by rage or wounded by loss. After twenty years my knowledge of the place is limited. And I don’t think any sense of ownership I may have had runs all that deep.

A change I noticed that I wasn’t entirely sure about: more chains, fewer independent businesses. Or, at least, I noticed places that had been independent businesses that have been replaced by chains. That has happened in a lot of college towns. Princeton, for example. It’s not unique to Towson. Yet there seemed to be more small, independent businesses on the main drag that leads up to The Rec Room and Recher Theatre. Possibly it all balances out.

The place I feel most sentimental about is the public library, which is still there in the center of everything. As it should be. Now its exterior is enhanced with brightly colored designs. I like it! My older daughter and I spent so much time there back when I was counting every penny and almost all our entertainment had to be free. It was our home away from home. 

Oh, yes. Raising Cane’s. There’s one coming to Columbia, you know. Does it live up to the hype? Well, it’s a whole lotta food. This combo/box is probably a million calories and, at almost twelve dollars, it’s not exactly cheap eats. Very tasty, though. The chicken is amazing. To be honest, I liked everything but the coleslaw flavor wasn’t quite “it” for me (but close.) 

What’s in that dipping sauce, anyway?

We struggle desperately and painfully with change here in Columbia/HoCo. I found it almost restful to go somewhere else and simply experience changes that I had nothing to do with. 

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. - - Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, 1940