GOING HOME AGAIN ...

York Native Wants To Go Home Again.
Published in the York Dispatch when I was there

“Where are you from?” is a question every Californian learns to answer early on, and for good reason. Most of us are from "someplace else.” For 40 years I have said, “Oh, I am from York, a small town in Southeastern Pennsylvania, about 90 miles from Philadelphia.”

Three possible replies to my saying, "Where I am from have been." They are:
• “Oh?” That indicates a willingness to move onto the next subject.
• “Oh I know York.” That’s what I call a “nodding acquaintance” or "salesman’s” relay that translates to: “I traveled Through York one day in my life and I 'know' it well!”
• But the response I love is, “Oh, really. I come from a small town, too.” That response has led to conversations that have formed lifelong relationships.

York! The stories of my youth; the mythologies of my life are wrapped in a little town in Pennsylvania. As I sit here in my home in the Los Angeles area those years, those experiences there seem so rich and they have are the reason I have plan a trip back for the first since York Corp. moved us there when I was 1 ½ years old.

My first memory in life is of the Yorktowne Hotel. We lived there for three months before we moved into a house on Pinehurst Road and later into another on Eastern Boulevard in Yorkshire.

And in third grade I met Lewin Richmond Lutz, III of whom I say, “I still know a friend I met in third grade.”

To be able to say that is, for me, at the heart of what community is about. I remember an old Pennsylvania Dutch saying, true or not, “it takes seven generation to know a Dutchman but once you know him, you know him for life.”

As my trip gets closer, I am reminiscing. I remember my first date at the Strand with a girl whose name is now lost. I still have the newspaper as from the movie. In my mind’s eye, I see Yorkshire Elementary School, a two room schoolhouse.

I want to walk over the hills around Yorkshire. I want to eat at the Yorktowne and remember the many times my family did. I want to worship in the churches I grew up in. I want to...

I am, am however, not naive. The world around me in my new home here in Los Angeles has changed. It changes each day. And in my research on “going home again," I thought I saw an Army tank on the streets of York!

Could that have actually been the city of my memory? Are “big city” issues like race, homelessness and segregation that we struggle with here reflected in the town of my youth?

Did urban sprawl steal the farmlands and cornfields I wandered through? Is it still safe to walk around downtown York at night? Does the Cordorus Creek still look polluted and smell 40 years later? Does my best friend from third grade really have grandkids?

I do not know what it will be like when I am actually there. I do not know if you can “go home again.” All I know is that I want it a town called York of which David Rush writes, this place “can offer the very best of what American can offer." That is the place I remember.