"There's no place like home" and "Who say's you can't go home" are popular sayings, but for many people these don't apply because the home of their childhood is gone.
Even if a child's home life was good and the family never broke up, there are many instances where the only place to go back home is in one's memory.
This was "brought home" to me last night as I wandered around Ancestry.com.
I looked up my mother's father and found out that he had to register for the draft twice, once for World War I and again for World War II. In the first case, he had a wife and a young child; in the second he was 55.
This second registration brought back memories for me. He gave his address as E. 152nd St. in Cleveland, Ohio and his employer as Cardinal Drug. I had been wondering about the name of that drugstore a couple of times last month. Before my father built the house in Bainbridge Twp., we had lived above Cardinal Drug. Some of my earliest memories are from that apartment: the first time that I poured milk myself and having a tank that gave off sparks as I pushed it.
I looked up the address on Google Maps and asked for the street view. It was a parking lot! OK, is the firehouse across the street still there? I turned the "camera" around, and sure enough it was. I don't think it is used as a firehouse anymore. The doors are too small for modern fire trucks and there were no signs on the building.
This is not the only home I can't go back to.
Years ago I tried to take a picture of the house on Detroit Ave. that I lived in when I was 9 to 12. I remember our ballgames in the tiny backyard and climbing the tree that was smack up against the garage. In fact, I think I have a picture somewhere of my brother in that tree. When I got back to Minnesota I discovered I had had no film in the camera. On another trip it was gone. The last time I visited Cleveland four years ago, there was only one house left of the group of five in a row.
I think it was last year that I looked on Google Maps for the apartment building that we lived in after the Detroit Ave. house. It had been next to a vacant lot owned by the transit system. We used the lot as a playground. We had many a pickup baseball game in that playground. Then the transit system expanded its bus lot and fenced in our old playground. When I looked on Google Maps, even the apartment building was gone.
The house that my father built? I only lived in it a year or two. I remember the sledding ramp that my father built us one winter and my brother and I pulling each other around in an oil drum in a wagon. The wagon tipped and I had to get stitches in my forehead. My parents split and my mother moved us out and stayed with her aunt and uncle until we moved to the apartment building. My father's house is still there with some extensions and my stepmother still lives there. Some of my half-siblings say they will tear the house down and sell the property when she dies. They will probably sell the 10 or 20 acres for somebody to build a McMansion.
