a trip 'home'

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just checking in folks. haven't posted here in a few months. hope you're all ok.

i want to share a quick story.

i hadn't seen anyone from my home town in years and years.

i've lived in big cities since 1996. Baltimore, Austin, etc...

And where I'm originally from is a dust town in middle of nowhere TX. as much as i hated that tiny town, i felt a longing for it & a few memories from way back.

as the city i live in now, and the way things had not worked out for me, professionally i felt i just had to go. you know sometimes you just have to get out of town for a day or two. i don't own a car, and my transportation is quite limited.

so last week i hopped an amtrak train and went to visit. i was only there for about 30 hours, but the trip showed just how much everything had changed... and how much it had not changed.

in short its a BS town in texas that (pardon me) seems to be trying to ... gentrify itself without gentrifying itself. instead of revitalizing its historic buildings, it leaves them for dead and sprouts up stripmall type stuff instead.

imagine a small city that wants to be Arlen TX. When at its core is really a 'Mayberry' (if you can dig it)

it wasn't that great of a trip, meaning there were no great reunions, and my old friend who i really wanted to visit, was as boring as hell, i mean.. i come to visit after several years, and he and spent most of my visit asleep.

about the only great thing about it, was waiting on the train coming home, there was a delay somewhere up the line, and i sat completely alone at sunset at a historic train depot, in an all but deserted part of town. i swear, there was no one but me, and those were a magical two hours.

when i arrived back in my city, i felt a safe anonymity, but an odd nostalgia for the few sprinkles of good times i DID have in that town some 20+years ago. my first love, streets, but those days are way in the past. those days are gone.

hope i didn't post in the wrong forum. don't know where else to post
somehow reminded me of a johnny thunders song. listen if you like

take care

I'm glad you were able to experience the beautiful sunset in an historic setting.

I hope things get better for you, professionally, in the city where you're living in now.

Nostalgia you say...interesting, me and my brother have also been getting that feeling a lot lately of course we have a somewhat different background after years of moving we where settled for a while in a small town in Colorado same state I still live in. We have not gone back to visit recently but within the past couple years we've gone by there a few times and it is changing and not so much for the better. I was actually going to post a thread and ask how many people here where having such feelings lately.

The last time I was "back home" was about a decade ago, after about fifteen years away. While I enjoyed visiting my old haunts, most of the people I'd known were gone. Those who were still left and knew me as a child expected me to still be 'weird' and act the same way I did when we were teenagers.

Driving up the hill to my dad's home brought on some anxiety, but when I turned a corner and actually saw the place, I felt sick to my stomach and had to drive past the house without stopping. He was no longer living there, so I did not have to stop.

(I said a short prayer, hoping that the new owners would never know the terror I felt every time I heard my dad's voice calling my name from downstairs.)

I would like to move back and retire there; but the quiet, laid-back people who used to run the town have been replaced by 'Yuppies' who seem to have been caught in a time warp from the 1980s.

My home-town is home no longer ...