Weird feeling as I get older

Oh my God no. I grew up in Miami.

Yes. Northern winters are killing me.

I live in the state I grew up in and at 55 am thinking I'd like to relocate far away

but not florida

Jeebus no. I grew up in NYC. Never, EVER wanna go back there again. Ick.

That's why I usually go "up home" once a year, usually in July.

I used to go up for Xmas as well, but winters in the NE are desolate and depressing, so I stopped.

Not really. Not because I don't like Minnesota and Minneapolis, I do, but because parents, sister, good friends primarily don't live there. I do have some friends and relatives, but not the Tier 1 people, if you know what I mean.

I turn 55, this year, and after almost 25 years in San Francisco, I've been wanting to leave for years. I came form southern California, but not sure where to go next.

I live about 50 miles from where I grew up. I miss my neighborhood and the simple times from when I grew up there. I wish my parents didn't sell the house, I never thought they would.

[quote] I turn 55, this year, and after almost 25 years in San Francisco,

I see you got an early birthday present of an extra comma! Nice.

As you begin to feel your own mortality, it's somewhat natural to be nostalgic for the simpler times of your youth - all the people and places that you remember.

It ain't there anymore, OP. Not the way you remember it. You moved on and you changed. The home you grew up in did, too. It is not 1967 for either of you.

Are you feeling a pull to move back to your childhood home? Or just a visit?

On a much smaller scale, yes, OP.

I still live where I grew up and my mother still lives in the house I grew up in, so I may not be the demographic you’re looking for, however:

I’m younger than you, but I still love to drive by places I went to as a kid. See what’s changed, relive memories, etc.

Recently I drove past my grandparents’ house, who are both long gone and haven’t lived there in over 30 years. But I went there as a kid every Christmas so the memories came flooding back.

Perhaps it is time for you to spawn.

R10, your post is a great reflection of what I was trying to say as I was typing.

I was born & raised in NYC and now live in another state almost 50 years later. I have yet to go back to the neighborhood that I grew up in. It's been decades. Although I've seen picture of some of the changes, I want to go back just one more time and go to all the neighborhood places that were so familiar to me. My grade school still stands - I'd love to go in and walk around, go to the classroom where I met my best friend when we were 12. Would it even be possible to go to the apartment building I grew up in and go to that old apt and see it? Probably not. I don't know why, maybe to put final closure on it now that my parents and family members have died. I have so many memories of that place.

Yes, OP. I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of DC. I haven't lived there for more than 30 years, but I have always considered it home. Nowhere else that I've lived - certainly not New York (which feels like a foreign country to me now) nor even the Philadelphia area, where I've lived for 20 years - feels as natural and comfortable to me. As I approach retirement, I feel an almost physical longing to go home.

When I my mother was alive, I visited regularly, so I'm well aware that the suburbs I grew up in have changed dramatically. I'm also painfully aware of the very high housing costs in the DC area. I haven't made final plans for retirement, which is still 3-4 years away, but if I could afford it, I know exactly where I'd live ... right down to the condominium building I'd buy in.

[quote] Are you feeling a pull to move back to your childhood home? Or just a visit?

Not move, just visit. My childhood was abusive, so there are no warm feelings about that. Both parents are long gone.

I do have a brother and some extended family I care about. And I just saw my brother a few months back (before all this covid crap).

It’s a feeling that comes over me, once in a while. Weird.

Walking Distance of Twilight Zone.

Yeah, I actually did go back but it just wasn't the same. It never really is like how it was. In some ways it is but especially if it's your childhood it's just not. I found myself thinking. Oh. Is that really what I thought was so amazing as a kid? Everything is amazing when you're a kid.

Go back to St. Louis County?

This makes me sad. They found these old school chalkboards and an older woman who went to a school like that saw it and cried. It's hard to let go when there was so much life back then and then the world changed and moved on.

Be nice to older people.

None of my family lives there anymore. Funny, I had about 50 relatives in my hometown & they’re all gone. Either dead or moved far away. They’re completely redoing my hometown & the Main Street I knew is gone. They’ve taken down half the town & replaced it with high density housing & it’s ugly. Modern, tacky style. In the new part of town theyve put a lot of restaurants/bars & taken away free parking. Not only do you have to pay for parking, but there isn’t enough of it. If you make high density housing in a suburb you need high density parking. Nobody is Uber ing back & forth to work. And the new restaurant/bars are attracting a lot of trashy drinkers. And it’s become Trumpy. The last thing I want is to be around a lot of drunken Gen X and millennial Trumpsters. Their parents all moved to the Villages.

I’d like to go back to my old hometown. But not the one that’s there now.

Thanks for a link to a paywalled site R20.

[quote] Would it even be possible to go to the apartment building I grew up in and go to that old apt and see it?

Of course you can. But I warn you, there may be a Spanish family living there now.

[quote] It’s a feeling that comes over me, once in a while. Weird.

Weird? I don’t think so. Did you read the posts? I’m being rhetorical, not snarky.

And if it is weird, at least you’re in good company with other weirdos here.

What I find fascinating is how good the schools seemed at my grandparents schools after looking at their yearbooks on Classmates.com. Back in 1940-1950. They had tennis, track, music, all sorts of things we have to day but everything seems more polished. Even in their to tiny rural Oklahoma town.

I ever found my grandpa's handwriting in his yearbook. "I enjoyed attending class with you." Lol.

Out of the blue when I was about 40, I started to feel a tug, yes. But it wasn't really to my hometown, but more to the same feeling. Small town, lots of country homes, greenery, open space, big trees, etc. We bought a weekend home in a small town not far from our city and it has totally satisfied what I wanted. In fact I'd like to reverse it at some point and spend maybe 5 nights in the country and two in the city each week, generally.

R25, In my parents' day (your grandparents' era), fewer people finished high school, so high schools taught at a higher level. That is, the least academically apt students dropped out or never went in the first place, so the students who ended up graduating were above average to start with.

Also, there was more agreement and unity about what a high school graduate should study and know upon graduation. In that sense, the schools were better than average American high schools now. The best HS's today (nearly always in affluent areas) are just as good today as they were back then, maybe even better. The high schools everyone else goes to ... not so much.

What R26 said, it's the feeling I would like to revisit.

It’s easier to control small homogenous groups whose members are in roughy the same economic situation, R25. When towns get bigger, new people move in who are different. Different religions, different politics, different economics, different language aptitude. When I was in catholic grammar school all the nuns were in my ethic group. We shared the same religion. They grew up in much the same situation that we did - working class. When I went to public school it was disorienting. My ethnic group was not the majority group. There were people from different religions. Some kids were rich, some were middle class, working class & poor. There was a group of kids that were very materialistic & fashion oriented. You had to have money to be in their group. They made fun of those if us who didn’t have money & didn’t wear the latest fashions, or who had physical features they considered unacceptable. The public school drew from a larger area, not just one town. Teachers lacked control over so many student who were so different from each other. They couldn’t appeal to students’ shared values because different groups had different values.

Plus there’s a lot of media telling kids what’s cool & what’s not. Your grandparents weren’t told their hair & clothes needed to look a certain way & your skin shouldn’t have acne or you shouldn’t wear unfashionable eyeglasses. Homemade clothes or hand me downs were ok. Media bombards young people & tells them they must be cool.

my hometown is an imploded shell of its former self and i went back regularly to take care of my parents, so give me a decade or two and maybe i’ll miss it. there’s always google maps.

I understand that feeling. It’s interesting how when we’re young, we idealize the future, yet the older we get, the more we idealize the past. Better to focus on enjoying the present as much as possible!

I have no small town. I would love to pick one in a nice area and move to it.

Small towns can be nice places to be. Especially pretty ones.

Hell no. I grew up in coastal Connecticut and always hated winter and being cold. Now that I live further South, I will never live somewhere cold again. I hate even having to visit family in winter.

However, I DO wish I could return to a simpler time.

"Go back to St. Louis County?"

St. Louis County actually has some really nice cities, towns, enclaves. Even portions of St. Louis itself (gasp) is really nice.

I grew up in a nice suburb (yes, IMO, it was a nice suburb). I really hate long work commutes, so I can't see myself living there now. I have a job that allows me to work from home sometimes, but there are times when I have to actually show up, in the morning during rush hour.

However, I love the little neighborhood and there are 2nd generations of people still living there. If I were retired, I would like to live there again.

R29 That's true but the downside of then was they must have felt enormous pressure to get married young, have children, stay in the closet.

You're right about the glasses. My grandfather's hs prom date had very unbecoming cat eye glasses. She looks like a typical old lady. I can only imagine those were considered stylish for the time.

Oh, no.

Nothing terrible happened there except that it took 17 years to find my way out of the place. There's no reason or appeal to return, and I live more than 4000 miles away.

I can't go "home". Even if I wanted contact with my asshole family members, they've all moved away from the town where I grew up, because the place has become fantastically expensive.

So whatever longing I have for home and family has taken a different form, than wanting to go back.

I live in NYC but I grew up in a very pretty Ohio suburb. It’s nice to remember days by the lake, etc., but my God, actually choose to live among those small-minded Republicans? No thanks.

Thankfully everyone in my family moved away so I don’t have to ever spend another minute in that town.

OP, here is the beginning of a poem by the medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide, who wrote in Middle High German. I'm not sure it quite expresses your feelings, but I find its sentiments close to universal.

Have also attached a musical version (it would have been sung in Walther's day) which is a little like a dirge -- if you're interested.

Where have they gone to, all the years I’ve had?

Has life been just a dream, or was it real?

What I believed was there, did it exist?

Perhaps I was asleep, and couldn’t tell.

And now that I’m awake, things known as closely

as my own right hand, I do not recognise.

The people and the places that as a boy I knew

have all grown strange to me, as if they were not true.

The children that I played with once are old and slow;

the fields are burned, the forests have been felled.

Did not the river flow where it has always flowed,

the sadness that I feel could not be borne.

Many who knew me well now greet me distantly;

a lack of understanding plagues the whole, wide world.

Often I remember so many joyous days

that now have vanished traceless, like ripples on the sea for evermore.

Looks like getting really old makes people happy. I can't wait.

You can't go home again.

“Intellectually, I know the home I look back on existed for only a moment, and even then only in my mind. The hometown I remember is a figment; a collage of scenes I constructed in my mind to give life an anchor in time.

The truth is, the place I remember as home never existed.

It was always in a state of flux, but when I was there, the changes seemed gradual and I was too busy to notice.”

Sorry OP, but you can't go home again.

Not for my hometown. But I know what you mean, OP.

I moved away from Clarksdale, MS to New Orleans when I was 18 and have no desire to go back. Who in their right mind wants to return to Mississippi?!!! I did return for my tenth high school graduation reunion and had a blast but that was only because of my high school friends. I did not see my mother or my stepfather while I was there and doubt I will ever see them again. They are quite toxic for me.

I live in the town I grew up in. But I was born in Brooklyn, NY. I remember a lot about where I was born even though I didn't live there for long.

I've Googled our old address. The brownstone we lived in (and the one my maternal grandparents lived in next door) are now worth close to $1M. When we moved to NJ in 1965, my Dad was making about $400 a week! I miss walking to Eastern Parkway or down to Atlantic Avenue. Buying a pickle from a barrel. The area may look about the same but it's the people that made your neighborhood a neighborhood.

R44, meet r42.

(A mere two fucking posts!)

The older I get the more nostalgic I get for the old days - which is ridiculous and unfounded because I had a horrible childhood and adolescence. So for the life of me I can't figure out why I feel the way I do. Nostalgia for what could have been but wasn't?

The change I have made is moving back to the northeast, where I was born and grew up. It feels natural after so many years away from the NE and feeling like a stranger in a strange land.

Don't do it, OP. It only works out well in Hallmark movies.