Back to the Land

Going Home at 68

It seemed like the right time for a change of scenery, pace, and space. After three years of living in community with 18 other people — most of whom were half my age or less — I left the Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston and moved back to my one-bedroom condo in Medford Square last fall. Living in community had its ups and downs, and after 2+ good years at the Friends House, the negatives began to outweigh the positives. So, I headed back to Medford and hunkered down there over a long, cold winter.

But I didn't want to stay in Medford long-term, and didn't want to stay in the same apartment where I'd lived for 18 years before my three-year adventure in Boston. And so I decided to try a low-stakes, temporary move back to "the Land," to my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.

I carved three months out of my not so busy schedule, packed up my car, and headed west. Soon I was ensconced in a small brick rental house in the same Cleveland neighborhood where I'd taught middle-school-aged deaf children at A.G. Bell School in the early '80s, just after I graduated from college.

Back then, I was young, fit, and depressed. Still closeted, in denial, I dated women and tried to be someone I wasn't. Finally, in the mid-'80s, after I'd moved to Columbus to teach at the Ohio School for the Deaf, I came out and started to date men.

Now, all these years later, I'm completing a circle, obeying a visceral tug to come home, to tend to my Midwestern roots. Or maybe this is all part of getting older — it seems I'm integrating, absorbing, making peace with my multiple identities: I'm a gay, Jewish, hard-of-hearing writer from Cleveland.

In 1980, after graduating from college in Tennessee, I returned to Cleveland. But there were too many memories, not enough distance from my parents, and not enough space to figure out who I was. Over the intervening years and decades, while living in Boston, I made frequent visits back home to support my mother after my father died from a heart attack in the late '80s and then, more recently, to assist Mom after the death of her second husband and her own slow but steady decline.

Now, I'm back in this place that's both strange and familiar. Strange, because both the city and I have changed in the past 40 years, and my parents are gone. And familiar, because I still know my way around, can navigate the streets, neighborhoods, know the ins and outs of this place and its people, with their nasal Great Lakes accent that the locals deny having, their underdog mentality, and the city's rough beauty, if only one knows where to look.

I don't have any simple answers as to why, after four decades away, I needed to return home. My mother died early last year, and other than one close cousin, I have no family left here. Instead, I have memories, experiences, these identities that seem to finally be coming together.

A case in point: though I am a Hebrew-school dropout, a 'twice a year' Jew who attends temple only on Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), I reached out to the Rabbi at my old synagogue and asked to come in for pastoral counseling. After all these years, I'm still wondering what it means to be one of God's "chosen people," and what it means to be Jewish without belief in the old man in the sky.

Another case: In the 1980s, I spent seven years teaching deaf children. In the '90s, I relearned American Sign Language the right way — from deaf people — and worked for several years as a sign language interpreter. In 2000, I left interpreting, got another job, and stopped using ASL. Sometime later, I suddenly lost about half of my own hearing. Now, 25 years later, I'm working with an ASL tutor and studying the language again — not for my career, but simply because I love "sign," and because, as a hard of hearing man, it might come in handy.

It's late April in Cleveland. The weather whipsaws between warm and cold, bright and overcast. Like the weather, the next chapter of my life feels unpredictable, uncharted territory. Thomas Wolfe famously said, "You can't go home again." Was he right? I guess time, and the next few months will tell.

Judah Leblang is a writer, teacher, and storyteller. Find out more at judahleblang.com