Hometown, New Tricks

You call a place home for 26 years and you get to thinking you know all there is to know about a place.  Well I've been back to my hometown this past week for the holidays and today with the help of som good friends discovered there are still things to learn and explore.

I visited this Currier Museum of Art this morning and it was an unexpected experience to be sure. Here was an actual art museum in the middle of Manchester...weird. The museum itself is quite nice and has just finished receiving a many year long renovation.  The current featured exhibition is man of Andy Warhol's various political portraits featuring several of the Kenendys.  While the exhibits and collections in the museum were all fairly impressive perhaps the most amazing thing to me is that apparently the museum also owns "The Zimmerman House."  This is a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home in the north section of Manchester.

Let's mull this over for a minute because I'm still in shock on a few levels...  Manchester, NH is home to the only Frank Lloyd Wright designed structure in New England. I didn't even know this until today!! How is it possible that I've only just learned of this after returning home to visit and having lived in Manchester for essentially my entire life?  This revelation more than anything is definitely a mind trip.  To make matters worse everyone I've asked "Did you know this?" was like "Wait you didn't?!"  I guess it just goes to show you that even something as familiar as the placed you've called home for the majority of you life can still surprise you.  I suppose that's probable a good thing.

This particular trip home has also provided some other revelations as well.  Don't get me wrong like coming back and seeing what's changed, visiting with family and friends, etc.  But I realized that with each trip back home feels a little less like home and a little more like some place I visit once and a while.  As if to underscore that point before the museum we were looking for a place to get breakfast and I suggested one of my favorite breakfast spots downtown, where I'd often stop for my morning bagel on the way to work.  The two friends I was with, who've called Manchester home for a few years now, were surprised to learn they'd never heard of this particular place. I always enjoy being able to pull out a place like that and flex my Manchester cred every one and a while.  Although this story also served to bring forth another realization.  As I stay away longer and longer there will of course come a point and time where Manchester will out pace me and they will be the one taking me to their favorite new places. Indeed his already happens with increasing frequency. Which isn't to say that is bad but certainly a different dynamic I'm obviously still getting used to.

There's a saying, I think, that says you can't go home again.  I think maybe it isn't that you can't go home again but is it still home once you do? To some extent I think when you really leave your home town and settle in somewhere else 'home' becomes kind of an echo of a memory of a snapshot in time from when you left and how you remember the way things were.