Thomas Wolfe once famously said, “You can’t go home again.”  While I tend to shy away from clichés, I happen to think this sad adage about growing up and apart from our childhood selves has special significance in my life.  Halfway through high school, I moved to a different town and school.  While this is a pretty huge event in the maturation and formation of anyone, for me it didn’t just signify a change in zip code and social circles but instead it changed the way I thought about “home”.

I grew up in Lincoln, MA, but I don’t consider that my hometown.  Sure, that’s where my earliest experiences and oldest friends come from, but I never saw it to completion.  I never experienced all of the dizzying drama that the last two years of high school bring, never experienced the collective insanity of graduation with those people.  I drifted apart from so many of them, since high school is all about immediacy and I lived 2 hours away.  I don’t even know where half of my old friends ended up, what college they went to, or with whom they went to the prom.