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.

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I peaked in sixth grade.  More precisely, I peaked athletically in the summer following sixth grade.  Well, perhaps peaked is the wrong word, as it implies that there was a steady improvement in my skill set.  Let’s just say that my athletic skills inexplicably spiked in the summer following sixth grade.

As previously mentioned, sports are not my strong suit.  My asthma put the kibosh on most running activities, relegating me to the role of embarrassed spectator in many a gym class.  My coordination wasn’t really evident—appearing less like a controlled movement of an athlete than the controlled spasms of an epileptic whenever any ball came my way. 

That's not even close to me...I never wore glasses! (From The Decemberists' album, "Picaresque)

My skills were non-existent and I was immediately branded as an outsider to the majority of my fellow male classmates.  I became an “indoor kid,” the kind that gets cheered for just finishing the race in a way that was meant to boost self esteem but really just highlighted my pathetic nature to the predators in my class.

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The greatest tragedy of my life is that I’m not a figment of someone’s imagination.

            My mind constantly exists in the world of fantasy, a world filled with adventures and daring deeds.  I desire larger than life scenarios divided along black and white lines of good versus evil.  I long to look out my window and see the skies peppered by brave men and women in capes and tights righting wrongs and beating the bad guys.  I wish to read newspaper headlines about some nefarious organization that doesn’t mean harm for ideological reasons based on religious fanaticism.  I prefer my shadowy groups lead by a man with a predilection to reptile themes and bungled attempts at global domination.  I want to find treasure maps, destroy ancient cursed relics, encounter creatures that exist beyond our planet, our dimension, or simply beyond the ken of our understanding.

            But that’s not the way this world works, nor the way my life has gone thus far.

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