Back in the Land

Though I often returned to my hometown—Cleveland, Ohio—to visit, and to take care of my elderly mother who passed away last year, I'd never had the chance to live back in the city that formed me. And so, in early April I packed up my car and headed 700 miles west, a three-month experiment to see if Thomas Wolfe was wrong, and if it was possible to go back home to a place I hadn't lived since the early '80s, when I had a different name, a different life.

Back then I was just out of college, a new graduate with a degree in deaf education and no idea of how to actually teach the deaf and hard of hearing students who filled my classes in the Cleveland Public Schools. I was closeted, still wrestling with my sexuality, trying (and failing) to ignore it. (It would be five long years before I finally crept out of the closet in Columbus, Ohio in 1985.)

Now, at 68, I was coming back as a semi-retired writer, a Senior Citizen, with my parents gone and the city changed, half the population vanished—its residents lost out to the suburbs—generic, far-flung—or moved out of state (like I did) out of state, to points east or west.

Here's what I've learned so far:

How to Return to Your Hometown After 44 Years:
A User's Guide

1. Do bring a carload of blankets, quilts, flannel sheets, and winter clothes as Cleveland spring begins in late May and not—as you recalled from childhood—in early April.

2. Do carry pictures of your now-deceased Cleveland family—father, mother, and younger brother—to remind you of who and where you come from, even though some of those memories are painful, achy, picking at scabs on a wound.

3. Do Not expect "Midwestern Nice" as you drive around town/come to realize that Cleveland drivers are no less cold, aggressive, daring than their Boston peers but that they will (unlike Bostonians) use their turn signals when they cut you off.

4. Do Not forget that you are in a Red State when Governor Dewine—who lacks a spine—signs the "Parents Bill of Rights" into law, essentially outing gay, lesbian, and trans kids in Ohio's public schools.

5. Do bundle up/borrow a friend's ski jacket, mittens, vest to attend the Guardians' home opener on a sunny 32-degree April day, with the wind howling off Lake Erie where you will sit just under and almost on the roof, and where the two teams will score a grand total of one run and the Guardians will win by walking in that run in the 9th inning.

6. Do Not lift a heavy mountain bike out of the trunk of your car and tweak your low back, forgetting that you are 68 years old and not the lean mean running machine you were when you left town in 1981.

7. Do bring your writing books, notes, and course outlines even though the class you were scheduled to teach will not run because even though you think about/fixate/live and die for Cleveland and its teams you have not lived here for 4-1/2 decades and remain obscure, an unknown quantity.

8. Do Not forget your hoodie, mask, and eyewear when the midges (thousands of tiny bugs that travel in virtual clouds from lakefront to ten miles inland) emerge in late May, adhering to car, door, window screens and face, tunneling into any orifice they can find.

9. And finally—Do Not carry expectations/agendas/a to-do list for the following: