In a Town This Size: ‘Coming Home Again’

Thomas Wolfe’s caution about not going home again has been rattling around my head the past few weeks as I’ve been boxing up and tossing out forty years or so of adult life and making a decisive return to Ogden, my birthplace. 

There has been a lot to stuff into those boxes – a pair of combat boots from my Army days, several hundred letters from a long-ago LDS mission to Argentina, fading photographs from a marriage (begun and ended), notes and school reports from two grown daughters, letters and cards from a dozen friends, office memos, paystubs, and various reminders that I worked a half dozen jobs over the past four decades. 

The grand piano, three saxophones, a trumpet, and a guitar – my alternatives to therapy – take up precious space but remain untouchable. Smaller but more unwieldy are the half dreams and ragged expectations. Enough dusty knickknacks to fill a small museum will need to be culled. And the books, thousands of them, will travel with me.

The moving boxes are snugly packed and loaded into the truck, ready for transport.

Beginning again at 60. Less a new life, I suppose, than one revised and updated. Hopeful and in love. Coming home. Baggage in tow.

I’m a native son of these parts. Were it not for the thinly disguised misogyny of the Box Elder School District in 1965, I’d have been born farther north, in Brigham City. Upon learning of my conception, the local educational patriarchy promptly demanded my mother’s resignation as a kindergarten teacher – leaving her and my undergraduate father jobless at Christmas and headed back to Ogden where he was going to school. 

They found space in a shabby apartment in a converted broom factory on 24th and Liberty (a “thoroughly miserable place,” my mother recalls). I arrived a few months later, among the last generation to be born in the old Dee Hospital, now long since shuttered and demolished. 

Jobs and a restless sense of adventure would soon take my parents and our family around the world, first to Idaho, later to Tonga and Australia, to Wyoming, north to Alaska, and finally back to Utah. I’ve never been to Spain, but an LDS mission in Argentina taught me Spanish and a love for yerba mate and World Cup soccer. 

My daughters were raised in Sandy and Atlanta. After the divorce, I settled in Sugar House, which has been home for the past 15 years – by far the longest I’ve ever remained in one place. The moss was beginning to gather, though. Stones must roll.

So I’m here now, back home in Ogden, with Malans Peak, sturdy and ancient, in the backyard, and the daily whistle of Union Pacific freight cars blowing high and lonesome on the western horizon. Here now to unpack the boxes, put things in their place. 

I return to Ogden seeking possibility. Coming home brings with it a kind of relief mingled with apprehension. I’m here to share what it feels like to come back home again, to look with aging eyes on a place that is both familiar and strange. Like a ghost, my friend Ken says, wandering through an old memory.

I’m reminded, finally, that Thomas Wolfe also wrote that we must, inevitably, come home again, compelled by the magnetic pull of our birthplace. It is not fully clear to me yet – if Mr. Wolfe is right – why these places retain such a hold on our imagination, but I’m persuaded that he is correct; among the many places we call home, the place of our birth whispers to us, its voice low but clear.