Homecoming

In am preparing my mni course on Homer's poem, Odyssey, to teach at the old folks institute down here in Sarasota.  In essence it is the story of Odysseus, one of the major Greek warriors who fought at Troy, specifically his exertions and tribulations in the ten years it took him to get home, partly reality, partly fairy tale.  The essence of the narrative is, however,, homecoming, the first in a long line of stories on that theme, and in our own time a major influence on James Joyce when he composed his, to me unreadable novel, Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus.)  In re-reading Homer's poem, as well as the books and articles of mine, occasioned by various readings over the years, has as it always does led me to ponder homecoming as a spiritual and physical fact in my life. In sum there was no home to come to: my father died when I was six, Mother when I was twenty two.  422 Brown Street, the home of my childhood has long since been "developed," if I may use that obscene contemporary term, into apartments.  I took the sense of "back home for keeps" from visiting my parents-law (along with their usually  reluctant and always pouting daughter) who dwelt in an eighteenth century farmhouse that had been in my mother-in-law's family since the mid eighteen hundreds.  Alongside this familial experience I often visited my aunt's extended family in Wisconsin where there was family compound like the Kennedys on a lake, once upon a time ringed with estates of all my nearest blood kin on Daddy's side of the family.  My Chicago cousins, and their progeny, still enjoy the ritual of going back to the old homestead, every summer.  I, too, came from a branch of this family, my own consisting of six siblings who, however, grew up and spread out, to California, Florida, Massachusetts, only one staying in the "hometown."  The war came along just as the older set were either going off to college or into the military.  We never met again as a group until 1954 arbitrarily summoned back "home" (by this time located in a small apartment) for my mother's funeral, and greeting one another warily, since we were all grown up and distant.  In 1973 when I was living with my second wife and our four children in a great house in Brookline Massachusetts  invited all five of them without their children--mine were off at camp--for a reunion.  It was a great five days, lots of laughter, lots of drinks, lots of great wit, every one of us with a good funny bone, but then we parted and it was back to silence.  So now I am an old man, and if you follow this blog, you will know that recently I was exercised by the subject of dying alone.  My husband is here in our wee condo in Sarasota.  Family live far away.  A favorite cousin of mine has been keeping me up to date on the various deaths and fatal illnesses of the extended family in the Chicago area.  None of that obtains for me.  We, my children, my grandchildren and now my great grandchildren, all have lives all over the  country.  That is why my thoughts turn often to the scene in the film where the dying man takes an overdose of morphine and goes to sit and then expire on a park bench next to a friend on a lovely sunlit day.  That would be homecoming of a sort I had initially entitled this essay "Heaven Is Just Around The Corner," but I decided on the other because of my Homeric studies.