Return to Gone-Away
                                                                                                        Elizabeth Enright
                                                                                                        Illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush
                                                                                                        London: Heinemann, 1962

There's been a quickening, lately, as I'm sure you've noticed.  An emotional tugging,  a yearning to "get back to the garden" as Joni would say; a feeling that everything is going too fast and not necessarily in your favor and so you've got to not just sit there but do something for crying out loud.  For Pete's sake (whoever Pete is).

No wonder stories like "Gone-Away" appeal: the idea that somehow someday you'll stumble onto all the lovely parts of the past, all in one place and just waiting there all this time for you to come along and discover, and now all it will take is some tidying up, a little fixing and mending, some serious dusting, and then you can go back to the way things were before all the awful stuff started happening -- well, I hardly need ask, but isn't it tempting, isn't it pretty to think so? 

I'm as guilty as the next, I assure you, just in case you hadn't noticed.  I freely confess that sometimes I even miss things I've never  known.  And I imagine that in the very dim misty past, way before 1904, my forefathers -- doubtless brutish unkempt types who wore fur and worshipped trees --might perhaps have felt the same way too, some vague nostalgia for what used to be or might have been as they plundered the last of the Roman outposts.  And how could they not?  Pretty mosaic floors and naughty frescoes and indoor plumbing, and the servant boys and girls left behind cowering over there in the corner wearing skimpy fetching outfits.  And all the gold, of course.  How could the great unwashed not wonder what it must have been like to be comfy and civiilized, before they came along, raping, looting, pillaging.

Or turn the tables.  Be one of the Romans, waiting for the barbarians to knock at the gates.  Or anyone who winds up on the wrong side of history.  A very old woman I knew a long time ago once said to me, "I can't remember what I did yesterday.  But I can see as clear as anything the dress I was wearing the night I stood by the window with my sister and watched the Tsar's troops coming across the field on horseback.  You could see everything so clearly because of the fires burning, lighting up the sky." 

Okay, so obviously some memories are more vivid than others.  And sometimes all you can do is flee.  And I asked her, and she said no, she never ever wanted to go back.  Why would I? she asked.  Why would I want to go back? 

But some people do, I tried to explain. 

Some people don't want things to change, she said.  The Tsar, she added, mumbled, nodding.  And then she shrugged, as if to say so what?  She didn't care.  It didn't matter anymore.  It was that long ago. 

But still I wonder if it isn't true for some of us, that you get to a place where you begin to think about going back.  That you reach a point in time, in life, in the journey, when you find yourself wanting not just to go back but for it all to go back and be the way it used to be.  Even if it never was the way you would have liked, and only wished that it had been.  Or wish that it could have been, and you could go back to it.  And it would be different and the same at the same time.  The way it was supposed to have been, should have been, could have been.  And you could return.  And you could go home again.