The 1st Law of Hometown Dynamics: You ALWAYS go home again

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By Jeff Guin


This past week, I was chatting with a group of young people interning at the office where I work. Although they hailed from points across the U.S., several were spending their second summer in these scientific research internships, and some were already committed to come back next year.


“What is it,” they asked “about this little town in the middle of nowhere. I never intended to come back. It’s like it has its own gravity well.”


I laughed: “I was born here. I help dig the well!”


So many people fight to be something or somewhere else that what they know. That includes me. We chafe against everything we are and ever knew. We only want whatever the opposite might be. Somehow the struggle seems even more heated for those of us raised “down home” where ideals are passed-down, deepfried and embedded in concrete.


From the time I could remember, the concept of “time and place” captured my imagination. Listening to Don Williams sing about “Good Ole Boys Like Me” is bliss, though only the most unaware non-southerner would classify me as such. Reading Thomas Wolfe’s exhaustive, angsty treatises on the narrow-mindedness of small southern towns is arousingly depressing.


While working on my Master’s degree in Folklife and Southern Culture, I was once assigned to lead a class presentation on Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again.” I tabbed the 1,000 page book with nearly as many contextual sticky notes and used color-coded highlighting on selected passages. It was the presentation of my life, until my instructor asked question: “So, how would you argue this is a ‘southern’ novel?”


When the answer to a question seems blindingly obvious, you haven’t thought about it enough. Learning just enough about the world–and your life–makes it all easier to label and categorize. But when you’re looking for the bigger picture, all the labels and categories and sticky notes fade into your peripheral vision.


Identity comes from a lot of places. Some of it’s given. Some is discovered. Sometimes it’s an educated choice based in a pivotal moment in time. As I learned from the first minute my daughter was born, some is plain-old hardwired. But it’s always best enjoyed with disinterested amusement.


Yes, I love my hometown dearly and do my damnedest to advocate for its heritage and culture. It’s my mission to try to help other people learn how to do the same for themselves. I’ve learned that you can’t make your life’s mission to escape your heritage without holding yourself in contempt. Your liberty and your legacy lies in promoting the best parts of both.