The Necessary Nostalgia of Going Home

There’s no place like it. Thank goodness.

It is indulgent to go home. For the first time in more than two years this week, I went back to Mattoon, Illinois, the small rural town where I, and every generation of my family for more than 125 years, grew up. Like so many towns like it, towns that have been abandoned by industry — the only major employers left from when I lived there are the community college and the hospital — Mattoon is so different than it was when I last lived there in 1993 that parts of it are barely recognizable. But the foundation, the husk, is still there. The streets are the same. The high school hasn’t moved. You can still find a whole bunch of Leitches there. It remains my home.

But it is always still indulgent to go back. You have so many roles as an adult, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a co-worker, a citizen, and these roles necessitate, in some ways, that you play a part — to place a little bit of yourself in storage so that you may perform what it required of you. The great Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, New York is about this idea, how you divide yourself up into so many different compartments, depending on whom you happen to be interacting with, on what role you are playing, that it can become confusing, even impossible, to figure out who you actually are. I try to be a good father, and trying to…