The GeekHiker

For those interested, this is the last of the backposts.

I’m sitting at the airport, staring out at the tarmac, and thinking about the old house.  I feel like I’m missing something, but not the house itself.  What, then?

I spent only about six years at that house, but they were formative years.  Those years in high school, where you start to figure out who you really are.  At that time in your life where you think that figuring out who you really are is an attainable goal, rather than simply a journey.

My first girlfriend and I hung out at that house.  We left for my senior ball from the house.  And no, I didn’t get laid that night.

I remember writing my first (extremely cheesy) screenplay in the family room, back when I had dreams of making movies.

I remember coming home on hot summer days and stepping inside the front door, the entryway lined with marble tile and cooling the feet instantly.

I remember the floor heating system, and on cold winter days in Sacramento, sitting on top with the hot air running up my back.  The room didn’t get warm, but you sure felt great.

I remember sitting in the dining room, watching the squirrels run back and forth on the power lines and argue with each other.

I remember the meals after my grandparent’s funerals.  I was in San Francisco at the time, and had to come up for my Father’s Mother’s funeral.  A week later, my Mom’s Father passed away, and up I came again.

No one said all the memories had to be good ones, now did they?

Despite the flood of memories, I really didn’t think about the house, the structure itself, all that much.

What’s missing, I think, is the sense of “home” now.  My parents have moved into a smaller place, two bedrooms.  My bedroom in the old house had become a storage room long ago, but they always kept a bed and nightstands in there, so when I came up over the years there was a place to stay.

In the new house, the second room will be an office.  They’re talking about getting a Murphy bed for the wall, but the idea of having a room is gone.  Of course, being in my thirties, I really don’t have much of a problem with that.  Still…

Someone I know has a home that they grew up in.  She looks forward to inheriting the house one day and, perhaps, raising her children there.  When she speaks of it, you can hear the powerful attachment she has for the place in her voice.

My life feels much more transient.  I’ve never owned a house.  We went through a few before I left for college, and since then it’s been a series of apartments.

Hell, the closest thing that I’ve had to long-term living since then was a crappy studio in Palms that I lived in for years.  The one I left shortly after the rat moved in.

So, in some ways, I’m undeniably jealous of her, and that sense of “home” that she has with the house she speaks of so fondly.  Whatever sense of it I might have had with the old house has been eliminated.

My parents have their little house to live out the next few years of their retirement in.  Certainly, I’m welcome to visit, but there’s no home to go back to.

Hell, according to the rules of their new housing development, guests can only stay a maximum of 60 days.

So there it is.

I don’t miss the structure.  It’s a house, it’s no longer in the family, and that’s that.

The memories, well the house merely served as a trigger.

So, in the end, what I think it is is something I wasn’t expecting.  There’s no “home” to go back to anymore.  Well, at least not for longer than 60 days.

That’s depressing as hell.