The Places You Don’t Go

Mama wanted to go home. Her home. To the small north Georgia town where she grew up. To the 100-plus year old, four-story brick house that raised four generations. To the sound of the local train, to the crunch of acorns underfoot, to the rock of the chair on the front porch.

Richard took her. He drove two hours south from Montgomery to Dothan and loaded up our then 80-year-old mama and set out. Six hours across Georgia in reverse-Sherman style. It’s not politically correct these days to make civil war references, but it’s what we grew up calling it.

Mama wanted to attend a local reception recognizing the Southern Jewish culture in Thomson, Georgia. I guess these days that would be politically correct.

Richard had made this trip many times. His first trip he was strapped in a car seat, sandwiched between his feisty brother Jeffrey and me, the somewhat perfect traveler who spent the long six hours cataloging images I would use in stories just like this one. The cataloging images part of that sentence is true.

There were other trips, where lounging across the backseat contrasted with being stuffed into the small space Daddy had left for the unlucky or unruly child. Richard, poor thing, was usually unlucky. He sat with his knees in his mouth while Jeffrey and I laid on our backs watching the cloud formations in the cornflower blue sky. What I remember most and can be confirmed by my brothers is the smoked-filled car we felt trapped in for said six-hour march across Georgia. There’s that reference to Southern history again, but at least cigarettes are mostly out of style these days.

The point about Richard taking Mama to Thomson that trip wasn’t about what driving there used to be. It's what driving there at that time meant for Mama and all of us.

Thomson is a place we don’t go anymore.

When folks die and a house full of a lifetime of memories is sold, that place, that town, that porch where you listened to your Jewish great grandmother talk in broken sentences spliced with Yiddish phrases the whole family repeats with fond memories, is no longer a place you go.

There is an abrupt end: to spending weeks in summer chasing fireflies, to long drives for Thanksgiving break helping Pop shake pecans from the tree in the front yard with a bamboo pole, to scavenging the old barn for treasures and taking those treasures into the white clapboard playhouse and playing house with your cousins, to quiet sundown hours on Friday nights watching your great grandmother light and then recite the ancient blessing over the Shabbat candles. It seemed as though her wrinkled face was suddenly smoothed by the glow of the silver candlesticks she hand-carried when she fled Lithuania as a young girl.

We have these memories because we retold and rehashed our family history - we: Mama, Aunt Susan and Aunt Ellen, Pop and Grandma Ida, great-Aunt Pearl, uncles, Carl and Gary, and even our Daddy, who married into the rich heritage of this small town and this Southern, Jewish family.

What happens to those places or has happened to that place for our family is what happens to marble when it becomes a headstone. Every nook and cranny of that 100-year old refuge has become etched into our memory and lives on beyond the death of two generations, the sale of the house, the lapsed visits to the Mother Ship.

Thomson is something we may never get over.

I think that trip five years ago was about more than that reception for Mama. Richard barely spoke of it, but for an 80-year old women who has survived drama that filled one book and could fill another, it was about a return - a return to all that was good, all that was right.

Mama wanted to be buried in Thomson. Alongside those who shaped her into the woman, wife, mother, friend, and author she had become.

She wanted to be home.

And so, when the time came this past Wednesday, I loaded her up in the car again and set out Sherman-style to take her there. I didn’t give a damn what was politically correct. I thought about keeping the windows shut tight and lighting a cigarette to commemorate the event. When we got there, I drove her around the same places, retold the same stories, cried some new tears.

Maybe the places we don’t go, we do go again.