Thoughts Of Home

While in Michigan this last weekend I made it a point to stop at the cemeteries where my great-great grandparents, great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents are buried. I never get a sense of anyone "being there" but feel an obligation, as my mother had, to check on the grave sites and make sure things were OK. Great-grandfather Aaron's headstone and been bumped a bit from the concrete slab on which it rested so I shoved it back in place. Dad and Mom's grave site up the road from there was in good shape so there was little to do there other than take a picture of the headstone on a distant relative's grave site that I've found. . .ahh. . .both disturbing and humorous:



Two very scary things together: graveyards and clowns.

They did get the plaque up indicating Dad's service in Korea:



and I ran across a couple more pictures of him from that time (either in Korea or at Fort Polk):




Shermlock Jr. ended up as skinny as Dad and is around the same age Dad was when these pictures were taken.

I didn't go to see the location of the house I lived in during my teens. It was on M20 just outside of Mt. Pleasant. There was an 80 acre field behind it where we would hunt pheasant in the fall with our neighbor, Virgil Melton:


My father wasn't inclined to hunt when I was growing up. At one time he did enjoy hunting but as a young man (after returning from Korea) he, his close friend Pat Rumbuski and their fathers were deer hunting when Pat's father was shot dead by another hunter. Dad and Granddad gave up hunting after that.

Anyway, the field behind our house in Mt. Pleasant, and the house itself, are no longer there, replaced by the Soaring Eagle Casino and the big electric sign advertising it.

This only reminds me that when I go "home" I can travel to its location but I can't go back thirty or forty years to where it really existed.

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."