So, this past weekend, Fathers Day weekend (of all weekends to choose), my mother and I took my father's ashes to be scattered nearish (Google Maps says 12.6 driving miles) to where he grew up. I've already previously posted links to the picture.
In his waning months, my father had been increasingly pining for "home" and for his deceased family. My dad grew up in Mahanoy City, PA. It's a town I've never really understood why anyone would want to go back to. It's dreary. It's ugly. It's claustrophobically small. It's dirty (as are most towns in mining areas or other areas of heavy industry). But, there was some kind of pull about it for him.
What I find so weird (well, that's not exactly the right word, but it will do for now), isn't that he would be attracted to there as much as the concept of "home". I've never felt it. I was born in Bellefonte, PA. Spent the first months of my life in State College PA, while my dad finished school and prepared for life in the Army (he was an ROTC scholarship student). Moved briefly to the midwest (Oklahoma) and then spent two years in the Nürnberg area of Germany while my dad did the Army officer thing. We came back to the US, when I was two, and settled in Carlisle, PA. I remained there until I went away to college at age 18. I then spent, pretty much continuously, the next four and a half years of my life at Penn State's University Park campus. I came back to Carlisle for about six months before moving to the DC area. In the seventeen years I've now been living in the DC area, I've lived in (order) Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax City, Falls Church and finally back in Alexandria (bought a house in Alexandria in late 2002, so, all those other places in NoVA happened in a less than nine-year span).
I've not felt a sense of "home" in any of the places I've lived. They've all been just that, "where I've lived." I've had no particular sense of attachment to the towns, the areas or the people in them. I've no tug to return to any of them.
When I go back to Carlisle to visit my mom, it's appealing from the standpoint of being relaxed and could have a yard for dogs and gardens, but that applies to many small-town types of places I've been to, over the years.
Two years ago, I finally made my way back to Penn State (at the urging of my father). This first return to PSU, 16 years after I'd moved away, felt utterly alien. I looked around, and though much was the same, it felt completely cold, to me. Many PSU alumni seem to be inexplicably drawn to return. I've no such feeling. In fact, I kind of felt the opposite. It made me feel old and lonely. Everything that had felt good about the place felt like it was gone.
Ok.. That was a bit of a tangential way to say I don't understand how one can want to go "home" as I've no feeling, recollection or understanding of what it feels like to be "home."
In the end, I'm not sure my dad truly had such a true feeling, either. I mean, there's many aspects about our respective personalities and mental makeups that are similar. So, if I am an accurate yardstick for my dad's motivations, then it's entirely likely that my dad's desire to go "home" was based on the idea of going home more than an actual feeling of being "home".
In the end, I don't know that I am an accurate yardstick for measuring my father's motivations. While I feel our similarities may give me an insight into the man, I realize, at this point, that I never really knew my father. I knew him by his thoughts and actions, but I didn't know him. He wasn't an easy person to get to know - another way in which we are/were similar.
Overall, I don't feel like I'm that easy to get to know. I'm not sure that anyone really knows me. I know that, most times, I feel like I don't fully know me. I know that, for the most part, I feel very, very isolated. Many times, the more people are around me, the more isolated I feel. I don't really relate that well to people on anything approaching the kind of visceral level that would allow me to say "I know you". There've been very few people in my life that I've felt comfortable really talking to. While there's many people I've been able to have other than superficial conversations with (especially during my PSU years), I can count on one hand the number that I've felt any level of connection with. Now that my dad's gone, none of them are in my everyday life (and, in truth, since moving to DC, even dad wasn't in my "everyday" life).
I guess, for the first time, the finality of it all, the utter isolation that I've allowed myself to fall into has come crashing down. I've temporarily suspended my FaceBook account, because I don't want the type of shit I'm writing in this posting to end up reflected there. I'm comfortable being the dark-humored, cranky guy. I'm not comfortable polluting my friends' news feeds with this emo bullshit that this funk has caused to dribble out of me.
Fmeh.
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