Son's 'Homecoming' Full of Duncan Hines, Red Sox and Family
/The Boston Herald
It's the weirdest thing, preparing for a son to come home. Cleaning the house as if he were a guest. Counting the days until he arrives. "Rob's coming home,” I've been telling everyone for a month.
But the words are wrong. "Coming home" implies he is staying home. And he's not. He's just visiting. He'll be here a few days and then he'll go back to where he lives, where he works, where he's building a life. And yet he, too, calls this trip to where he grew up "coming home.”
I've been doing the mother thing, of course. Vacuuming his room. Dusting. Taking my clothes out of his drawers. Looking through his stuff: his collection of baseball cards; his hats - football, baseball, basketball and hockey. It seems he always wore a hat, from the time he was a toddler to the day he packed up his truck and drove away. And here they all are, in a box in his room. So much of his history in so small a place.
I've been reading over his autographs, too, pinned to his bulletin board - Willie Shoemaker, Bobby Orr, plus dozens of others I don't recognize. I stand shaking my head at the photos of Cybill Shepherd he taped to his closet door. He used to love "Moonlighting" and "The Brady Bunch" and "Davey and Goliath.” I am cleaning, but also I am wallowing in the past.
My son's room is a boy's room still, its gold-striped wallpaper out-of-date; the books on the shelves, schoolbooks, the sports trophies, a boy's laurels. Even his clothes, the ones he left behind, are old and outgrown.
I think as I clean that I should have changed it all. Changed the wallpaper and curtains. Given away the clothes that don't fit. Put away Turtle, who has sat on the bed for 20 years. Packed up the totem pole, which used to give him nightmares. Stored away the Fisher Price record player still on his shelf, and "The Pokey Little Puppy" and "Heathcliff Rides Again." I should have readied the room for a man.
And yet there is something so comforting about coming home to what you left behind that I'm reluctant to change any of it. I remember, after I got married, returning to my house - no longer my house, my parents' house, but it was mine, too; it would always be mine. The place I lived with my husband was not yet home. It was too new to be home. It was a doll's house, a great, big wonderful toy.
Home was more grounded. Home was the kitchen table I sat at every night, all the years I was growing up. Home was the living room couch, and the flowered wallpaper, and the coffee table with its doily under glass. Home was my room, with its maple bed and bureau, its frilly curtains, and the speakers my father installed in the walls.
Home is where I went to be nurtured, where I could be for all time, somebody's pampered child. My mother used to make French toast and bacon when I'd visit. It was what I always asked for. It held, for me, the sweet taste of home.
I've made meatballs and spaghetti sauce for my son. Bought Coke and Kraft single cheese slices and deli roast "beast." I've also baked a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting. Once, for his birthday, I bought a chocolate cake, a gourmet creation from a gourmet bakery. "This is much better than Duncan Hines," I told him. "It's made with lots of different kinds of chocolate."
He looked at the beautiful cake that wasn't dented in the middle, that didn't slope to one side and his face fell. "Try it, Rob. You'll love it. I know you will.” But he didn't like it at all. It was too different. It wasn't birthday cake. It didn't taste like a birthday. It didn't taste like home.
"Don't ever buy another cake," he told me then, and I never did. Duncan Hines is what he wanted and Duncan Hines is what he got, and what he'll continue to get whenever he comes home. Along with Turtle and ugly wallpaper, which only a boy who grew up with it could tolerate, and pizza from the Town Spa one night and Denenno's the next and subs from D&E and the Red Sox on TV and his family clustered around him.
That's what you want when you come home. Exactly what you left behind.
