06.15.03

Midwestern son realizes you can't go home again

By DICK MAYNARD Special to The Daily Sentinel 

 KEWANEE, Ill. — To paraphrase Thomas Wolfe, can anyone go home again?  

 Yesterday I rode through Cambridge, Ill. — Cambridge, where I was educated, grades one through 12. While this was the town where I spent my youth, my head is anything but overflowing with a great treasure trove of Cambridge memories. I have no desire to return to those Lone Ranger-like "thrilling days of yesteryear."  

 Why Cambridge was never a good fit eludes me to this day. Most likely, I was the proverbial round peg attempting to adjust to a square-hole environment in this western Illinois hamlet of less than 2,000 souls.  

 Supposedly, the human memory is most selective. Our brains are said to be a miracle in their ability to instantly recall the good things that occur in our life. At the same time, the cerebellum seems to possess a mysterious "delete key" that sends the memories of the unpleasant downers of our existence — the root canals, the first four Bronco Super Bowls or an IRS audit — to a pre-Windows recycle bin installed in our cranium.  

 This human trash basket seemingly empties out most of the bad stuff from years past and allows us to view our preceding years as a warm fuzzy that sees personal history through rose-colored memory glasses.  

 Yet I find very few fond memories of Cambridge — a tiny zircon attempting to shine amid the rolling cornfields and grunting hog lots in the western reaches of the Land of Lincoln — rolling around in my head. Recalling the positives in my Cambridge life takes such a brief moment.

 Why such distaste for the bucolic life offered by this village of large green lawns and lazy summer skies? It must have been caused by my own imperfections. Volumes have been written on the wonders of life in the apple-pie, Chicago Cub and new Buick world of the Midwest. Why so negative about my hometown? Nothing really bad or tragic ever happened to me in Cambridge.  

 After devouring "Home and Away," National Public Radio’s Scott Simon’s poignant and most touching elegy to his hometown of Chicago, where the reverie of recollections brought on by the Cubs, Bulls, Bears and an inner-city high school far outweighed the angst caused by family breakups or the ’68 Democratic convention, I know the fault must be with me, not with Cambridge.  

 Why, even Frank McCort had fond memories of Limerick in his moving tome "Angela’s Ashes," a book that was at one and the same time beautifully written and terminally depressing.  

 Thomas Wolfe waxed much more rhapsodic about Altamont than I could about Cambridge, although even Mr. Wolfe was forced to admit, "You Can’t Go Home Again."  

 The final five miles flew by and there it was, "Welcome to Cambridge."  

 I was back. It wasn’t the same town, not that I expected it to be. When I lived here the streets were lined with tall, towering elms.  

 But the Dutch Elm disease of the ’70s and ’80s had laid waste to the entire elm population of the Midwest. Cambridge now more closely resembles a barren mountain town, perched above tree line except there are no peaks on the horizon, only the flat landscape of cornfield after cornfield, hog house after hog house.  

 My bike followed the highway as it turned to circumvent the Henry County Courthouse, in all its Victorian splendor and on whose sidewalks I roller-skated away many a summer afternoon.  

 Cambridge looked good, much better than when I last drove through in 1996. The buildings making up the four-block business district were occupied. Last time I was here, they weren’t.  

 The building that housed my parents' dairy was now a doctor’s office. Imagine that. I rolled up and down the same Cambridge streets I pedaled as a youth some 50 years ago when my best friend Ron Lange and I covered Cambridge from the fairgrounds to high school on our single-speed Schwinns.  

 My bike turned and headed south, past the home where I grew up and, next door, the "new home" my parents built my junior year of high school. The "new home" that is now 48 years old. And in riding past these monuments to my youth, a Rascal Flats song kept rolling though my brain:  

 I’ve dealt with my ghosts and I’ve faced all my demons  

 Finally content with a past I regret  

 I’ve found you find strength in your moments of weakness  

 For once I’m at peace with myself  

 I’ve been burdened with blame, trapped in the past for too long  

 I’m moving on  

 And move on I did. It was in the summer of ’68 in Moline, 30 miles away. I was shopping at Turnstyle, a forerunner of Wal-Mart and Target, when I ran into one of my mother’s friends from Cambridge.  

 Why, Dick Maynard, what’re you doing now?"

 So I explained I was married and worked in sales for WQAD-TV.  

 "Amazing," she exclaimed, "I always thought by now you’d be in jail."  

 She wasn’t being mean or malicious, just stating what she thought to be fact. Later that night, detailing the day’s events over our evening meal I mentioned to Jan it might be time for us to move where folks didn’t remember the me that used to be. That move took us to Grand Junction where, in the words of John Denver, we wound up "going home to a place we’d never been before."  

 I’ve lived in this place and I know all the faces  

 Each one is different, but they’re always the same  

 They mean me no harm but it’s time that I face it

 They’ll never allow me to change  

 But I never dreamed that home would end up where I don’t belong  

 I’m moving on  

 My bike turned left and headed east, stopping at the edge of town. I looked back and the thought wandered through my mind, "Just how would my life have played out if I had stayed here?"  

 The day was rainy and cold, with an east wind making the weather seem more like late fall than early summer. But when that thought floated by, it wasn’t the weather that caused me to shiver.  

 The bike turned south and, without looking back again, I pedaled toward Bishop Hill.