One of my colleagues played Ozzie Osborne’s ‘Mama I am coming home’ when I told them I was going home for the holidays. I am not sure if the lyrics reflect this simple journey but it seemed to be a momentous occasion.
There is an innate sense of anticipation on the journey home, an eagerness that has got to do with a sense of familiarity that encompasses known faces, familiar terrain and other things that act as happy leitmotifs.
However, there is a stage in life when these leitmotifs get to become a little more sober. It does seem that the time gap between two home comings shrink and it was just yesterday that one was making the same journey. But the vast sweep of impact, of that time, on peoples life’s is breathtaking it gets personal – more grey hair, more spines that are bent, more sickness related to age, memories of once lively and healthy people created by their current debilitating bedridden state. A general question about somebody gets the overtone of whether the person is alive or is on the way out.
This is what struck me when I got back home. However there also was this scent of freshness from the youngsters who I saw last as babies, of youngsters who are now parents with children of their own.
The shoes remain the same but there is a production line of people who fill them over time and I am part of that production line.
1 comment:
One of the most fascinating things in this world is the sense of going home. It is like an attempt to pin a river to its banks. Going home can be geographical, or it can be an encounter with a tree, an insect or a steaming cup of tea one cold morning wherever elsewhere is.
If I hear Mr. Tyler somewhere singing Jaded, it would be something similar, and Angus Young's riffs, yes, but I am not sure whether the Oz has ever induced memories of home for me.
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