7 July 2022
Another afternoon sitting on the patio, listening to music and skinny dippin’. Another nostalgic tune from my iPhone – “Homeward Bound” by Simon and Garfunkel.
I’m sitting in the railway station.
Got a ticket for my destination.
On a tour of one-night stands
my suitcase and guitar in hand.
And every stop is neatly planned
for a poet and a one-man band.
Homeward bound,
I wish I was homeward bound,
Home where my thought’s escaping,
Home where my music’s playing,
Home where my love lies waiting silently for me.
Every day’s an endless stream
Of cigarettes and magazines.
And each town looks the same to me,
the movies and the factories
And every stranger’s face I see
reminds me that I long to be,
Homeward bound,
I wish I was homeward bound,
Home where my thought’s escaping,
Home where my music’s playing,
Home where my love lies waiting silently for me.
Tonight I’ll sing my songs again,
I’ll play the game and pretend.
But all my words come back to me
in shades of mediocrity
Like emptiness in harmony
I need someone to comfort me.
Homeward bound,
I wish I was homeward bound,
Home where my thought’s escaping,
Home where my music’s playing,
Home where my love lies waiting silently for me.
Silently for me.
I’m not the homesick type. That was my brother Archie. Too often, I was the get-away-from-home type but there was one instance when I did get a little homesick for something and it was when I was in radio school on Governors Island, New York.
Governors Island, back in 1969-1970, was a really neat place. You could escape the craziness of New York City yet hop on the Coast Guard ferry to the southern tip of Manhattan, catch a subway and be anywhere you wanted in the city. I typically hung around The Cloisters at the northern end of Manhattan or at the USO near Times Square. If you showed up at the USO, you could get either free or heavily discounted tickets to Broadway shows.
One of the things that attracted me to Governors Island was the architecture of the buildings and also the homes of the military families living on the island. There was something about some of the military housing that struck a note with me, almost like deja vu. The architecture of those homes was very familiar to me – perhaps from my time on military bases with Mom and Dad prior to his being sent to Korea. It was if the housing was frozen in time from WWII days. I mean, the houses even had coal chutes for heating.
Add that to walking those residential streets on the island in the fall with changing leaves, and later the snow covering the island, it brought some emotion up from deep within. It was almost like I belonged there among those houses. The park separating the rows of houses was as familiar to me as some of my haunts in Mississippi, or Fort Rucker, or Fort Bending, or Fort Bragg. I was never sure which. I have no idea why because New York was never a part of my life but it felt like home on that base.
I spent a lot of time in the library on base, first reading, then after I found the music carrels, I spent huge amounts of time listening to music on earphones. You’d check out a record, put it on a turntable at the carrel, and lose yourself in the music. “Homeward Bound” was one of those songs that spoke to me during those snowy evenings in the library. By the time the library closed, it was night and I would walk through the snow back to the barracks, often with Simon and Garfunkel lyrics in my mind.
Towards the end of my schooling at Governors Island, I gravitated to Johnny Cash. I never was much of a fan but somehow he began to grow on me. I had seen Cash in concert at Ole Miss (out of boredom) and thoroughly enjoyed his concert, much to my surprise. I still have no idea why I put on “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison” on the turntable but it got me nostalgic for trains.
I was so nostalgic for trains that when I graduated radio school and was headed for two weeks of liberty before my next duty station, I took the train from Penn Station south through New Jersey, Maryland, D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and finally into Atlanta. It reminded me of the trains we took to Havre de Grace, Maryland to see Dad when Archie and I were kids. If I’m not mistaken, you could pick the train up at Morton, Mississippi back in the 50’s and head north. If my memory is in error, I guess it was Meridian from where we departed northward.
That was back in the day of steam locomotives that burned coal. The smell of burning coal is so distinct, there is nothing like it. I loved it. Seeing the black smoke coming out of the stack of the engine was a thrill. I remember when the engine pulled to a stop at a station, it would release the steam in a great white cloud. Archie and I would put a penny on the rails of the station and go look for it after the train pulled out, hoping to find a flattened penny.
Sadly, in 1970, the end of the line was Atlanta. The line no longer ran through Meridian and Jackson so I hopped a flight to Jackson to begin my two weeks leave.
I left Mississippi when I was 21. Other than the few years Dad was stationed at military bases in the U.S., most of my early life was spent in the state. Now, I’m looking at 47 years in the state of Florida but I’ve never developed the sense of home in Florida that I had in Mississippi. I guess those early years really are the formative ones.
Stay tuned!