A Gentle Conclusion

Sometimes the hardest thing to understand is that we were not returning home. We were returning to the memory of it.

When I entered the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre as its artistic director, I made a fatal error.

I thought I was going home.

It had been a dream of mine for years. I had imagined returning to that place with everything I had gathered in my life, all the training, all the experience, all the love I still carried for theatre and for that particular building. I wanted to give it everything I had inside me.

And I was qualified. I was ready.

But readiness is not the same thing as belonging.

The moment I walked through the door, something felt strange. It was almost dreamlike. The building was there. The colors were there. Some of the same shapes and corners and familiar pieces remained. But the spirit that had held the place together, the blue of it, the old current running underneath it, was gone.

The place I had carried in my mind was built from the late eighties and early nineties. It was built from who I was then, and from the people who filled those rooms then, and from the hunger and possibility of that time.

But the world had moved on.

The institution had moved on.

And I had moved on too, even if I did not fully understand that yet.

That was the painful part. I had not returned to the place itself. I had returned to the memory of a place. And memory is a tricky architect. It leaves the lights on. It puts the tree back in the yard. It makes the front porch look just the way it did when you were young.

But it cannot bring back the people who made it home.

Perhaps that is why I have felt so tethered lately to Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. At the heart of that beautiful work is the quiet understanding that you can never really go home again. Not truly. Not in the way you imagined it.

Sometimes we learn that gently.

Sometimes we learn it bitterly.

I suppose I finally understand what the word bittersweet means. Not as an idea, but as a feeling. As a lived thing.

I think I now understand my own personal definition of bittersweet.

It was like having a dream about your childhood house. From the outside, everything looks exactly as it should. The lights are glowing in the windows. The old sycamore tree, the one that was cut down years ago, is standing again in the front yard. You are filled with relief because you think, somehow, you have found your way back.

Then you open the door.

Your things are there.

The rooms are there.

But another family is living inside.

A different mother. A different father. Different children at the table.

And in that moment, you understand the truth.

No matter how familiar it looks, that place is never going to feel like home again.

And yet I carry with me a treasure trove of the most wonderful friends and memories…