Tom Wolfe wrote the classic novel
”
You Can’t Go Home Again.
”
The book was nearly as good as the title. That exact phrase has
been running through my head recently during several unrelated
events.
Tom Wolfe wrote the classic novel “You Can’t Go Home Again.” The book was nearly as good as the title. That exact phrase has been running through my head recently during several unrelated events.
This week my husband and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. These years have been filled with laughter, tears, joy, anxiety, hope and love. Our life together has taken us from our first little apartment in New York to four other states across the country. We’ve seen it all and it is all good. But there is something strangely powerful about the lure of Gilroy. Our family left Gilroy once for a 22-month stint in Texas. Luckily, we came home soon enough to be able to fully return.
My oldest daughter is now in the 10h grade. She can’t go backwards; she is on her college track. As such, there is little time for her to focus on the dismal results of her California math standards test.
Confirming what I wrote last week, we now know that she is indeed one of the 31 percent of gifted students in the ninth grade that is losing ground in math.
She can’t take comfort in the fact that she scored at the 98th percentile on the latest CAT-6 Math test. She is too honest to try to put a positive spin on the fact that half of the students in her Honors Geometry class scored below proficient on the state standards test. She just knows that she can’t go back and fix mistakes which were not of her making.
Tutoring and studying will now further cut into what little free time she has. Despite what she calls “her lost year” in math, she is committed to do well enough to gain admittance to a good college.
My younger children are fully engaged in middle school and all the drama that accompanies that little soap opera. My youngest daughter might have been called a tomboy if she were in middle school in the 1970s. She is athletic and yet very feminine, and boys like her. I get regular updates on three boys “that like her like her.”
This is my baby, but she will never be a baby again. Watching her grow up is both exciting and profoundly bittersweet. Neither she nor I can go home again, and in quiet moments, we would both like to.
Our country is facing an increasingly difficult situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan. With countless Iraqi deaths and more than 1,000 American casualties, the war in Iraq drags on. Each day, our number of enemies increases.
Our troops can come home, but they can’t come home unchanged. Our country has not and will not recover from Sept. 11, 2001. When our country was attacked we lost a little bit of ourselves. We are no longer pure; we are scarred in ways we cannot even see. No matter where we live, none of us has really gone home again since 9/11. It is as if we are in our third year of a major remodel, and are just now figuring out that the house will keep its foundation but everything else will be changed.
The upcoming elections will be interesting. Our local school board race is of particular interest to me as I am actively engaged in the campaigns of two contenders. I had considered running for school board myself, but I knew that path would take me places I dare not tread while my kids were still young. There are many repercussions to making one open them self to public scrutiny.
As a columnist for the local paper, the repercussions are anything from praise from those who agree with you to verbal abuse from those who disagree. Running for elected office is different. It requires a formidable level of commitment of time and energy. It requires skills that I have not honed yet. I wish there was a minimum competency level required for those who choose to run for office, but such is not the case in our democracy.
At the most basic level, our local school board candidates have stepped forward and been forever changed by the experience. Win or lose on Nov. 2, these candidates won’t ever go home again.
