Chapter 4: What are your favorite books?

Originally written Jan. 11, 2021

I like lotsa books

I have many favorite books. Leaving Cheyenne by Larry McMurtry is high on that list, as is Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and On the Road by Jack Keruoac. Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford is another big one. It's about a high school kid who suffers culture shock when he moved from the South to a town very much like Santa Fe. I could relate to that (though technically Oklahoma isn't in the south.) Decades after I read it I got to meet Bradford, a longtime Santa Fe resident. I told him, only half-jokingly that Red Sky helped me survive high school.

In non-fiction, I've always loved Mystery Train by Greil Marcus and Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. (That's right, these two books were about music and politics, respectively. And when Thompson died in 2005, I wrote about my love for Campaign Trail ‘72 in my Roundhouse Round-up politics column, which can be read HERE)

But the book that had the biggest impact on my life and my way of thinking was You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe.

Near the end of the 700-plus page novel Wolfe wrote:

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

My grandmother gave me this book in October 1973 as a belated 20th birthday gift. She also gave me Wolfe's The Web and the Rock, but You Can't Go Home Again is the one that stuck with me.

I'd just gotten home from my first major hitchhiking trip (and had celebrated my actual birthday the month before with a college buddy, Bennet Wilson in Columbia, Missouri at a bar called The Loading Zone just a hop, skip and jump from the University of Missouri. After that, my thumb had taken me to Wisconsin, then, turning west, through the upper Midwest, Wyoming, spending a night in Yellowstone Park, then Montana, Idaho, Nevada, then California, where I ended up broke in San Francisco and decided to return to Santa Fe.

So when I read You Can't Go Home Again, I literally had gone home again, living with my mom, my grandmother, my brother and my sister.

I knew this was temporary. Though I'd taken a semester off to go on my hitchhiking adventure, I'd already re-enrolled at the University of New Mexico for the next semester, which started in January 1974.

Though I'd intended to get a job somewhere out of state when I graduated with a teaching degree a couple of years later, no offers came. I'd moved back to Santa Fe and again thought it would be a temporary stop. At one point, my old roommate Amarillo Mike had convinced me to move to Amarillo, where I already knew several of his buddies. But then I got an offer of a job managing a Cerrillos Road trailer park. I needed the money so I decided to stay in town, again thinking it was temporary. (And fortunately, the trailer park gig was very temporary, just a couple of months.)

But one afternoon, walking down Marcy Street and enjoying the fall colors of the trees, I realized that Santa Fe really was my home and I decided to stay. I settled in, eventually stumbling into a career in journalism, culminating in a 32-year stint at the Santa Fe New Mexican. [At the time it was] located on Marcy Street, so every year during the autumn, I still loved to walk down the street and enjoy the changing leaves.

So it probably seems odd that someone who stayed in the town where he went to high school and who worked in the same job for decades claims to have been influenced by a book called You Can't Go Home Again.

But what Wolfe was talking about in that book was more than just leaving a physical location. It's about keeping an awareness that important parts of your life are constantly changing. Favorite stores, restaurants and bars close. Friends come and go. Marriages and love affairs flourish and end. Children evolve from babies to cheerful toddlers, to rowdy kids to obnoxious teenagers, to adults. Loved ones die. Things change, sometimes for the worse but often for the better.

Thanks to Thomas Wolfe's book I realize the "escapes of Time and Memory," while sometimes alluring, are false comforts. I feel the pangs of bittersweet nostalgia most often when I see some young guy pushing a child in a stroller. It's tempting to fall back to those old beloved memories when I was doing that with my daughter, Molly or my son, Anton. Then I recall that wisdom from Wolfe.

And sitting here at my home, where I've lived now for 21 years, I know in my heart you can't go home again.

(Below: This is the edition of Wolfe's book my grandmother gave to me.)