Chapter 40

     He spent the next day touring some of the old familiar places in his former hometown. He guessed it was still his hometown, although right at this moment he felt like a man without a sense of place. He couldn’t imagine returning to his home in Chicago right now, and he was working up the courage to return to his family farm, which was only a short hour away. He wasn’t ready right this moment. Not yet.

    He drove slowly around the town, stopping at his old grade school, then his High School, and past his grandparent’s house where he had spent most of his Christmases growing up. He felt a pang of nostalgia remembering his life back then, and wondered to himself why we were so quick to remember the good and forget the bad. In any case only the best memories remained, and he imagined himself building snowmen, opening presents, and climbing up on the old roof to hurl snowballs at the cars that passed by below. It wasn’t Norman Rockwell, but for now it was all he had.

    His final stop was at the bank of the Colombia River, a place he had visited often as a young man in search of freedom from his hometown and inspiration for a different kind of life.  Much of his future life as a writer and psychologist was hatched in this very place, and for a moment he stopped and considered the history. He could never have envisioned that he would return here as a widower and deeply broken man at the age of 40 back then, and he stopped and considered the idea. Perhaps he would return here again at the age of 60 and once again contemplate the strange and unpredictable turns his life had taken over the previous 20 years. He hoped he could fill up those pages with something meaningful.

    Eventually he settled into a kind of peace sitting there by the river, as if his emotional memory had taken over, and allowed him to return to the once hopeful young artist still in his salad days, impatient and yet hopeful about the world in front of him still to be discovered. 

    He found himself thinking once again of Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey, and how his own life had circled around again and again on the wheel of adventure and discovery. The river for him had always been a kind of jumping off point, as it represented a kind of freedom and escape those left on dry land would always have to be curious about. It was standing here where he had eventually found the courage to leave his hometown and see the world as a young man, and he laughed how he had come back again a lifetime later, once again in search of courage to fight an unfinished battle. He knew he needed to return to his farm. 

He was almost ready.