Cedar Hill, TX

But, and perhaps not regrettably, reality in this case cannot be denied. Or at least, I can’t visit the place where I spent my formative (and thus undesirable) years and not feel an incredibly subtle mix of emotions. There is the surprise I mentioned in the previous paragraph, of how familiar everything seems, as if living somewhere for 10 years isn’t enough to make things familiar. Then there is the uncontrollable rush of images and stories and names that flood back into my mind, stories I thought I’d forgotten and names I’m sure I haven’t thought in 5 years–little modules of myself that have always been there but are suddenly noticed again, like little alien homunculi floating around in my mind. There is the unavoidable confrontation between myself as I was when I lived here and myself as I have become (and where did all my in-between selves go?).

Since we are on the eve of the release of Return of the King, it might be appropriate to draw a bit of an analogy to the hobbits’ return to the Shire. Just like Hobbiton, it seems that the fires of industry have consumed Cedar Hill. I don’t know when it went from being a small Texas town of 10,000 to the capital of Suburbia, with 30,000 inhabitants happily segregated into families with 2.5 kids, a cat and dog, and 1.5 Starbuckses, but some day it must have happened, to the utter surprise and chagrin of all (though I notice a lot of dry eyes, so maybe the town itself was in cahoots with the Big Bosses, conspiring to Barnes & Noblify my memories). Needless to say, the sense of familiarity I talked about is tempered by a jarring sense that something is different, and I’m not sure I like it.

Maybe the moral of this story is, you can always go home (even if you don’t realize it is home until you get there), but home is never the same. Towns change, landscapes change, people change–too many of your high school friends, though they never really left like they needed to, have somehow become the opposite of who you expected. Some are married, some are pregnant, some are off on what seem like permanent trips out of reality. Of course, that’s a bit superficial, since I’m often not too in touch with reality either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a core people recognize. So it is in this case.

These past few days have been a wonderful experience, visiting with family and friends in Dallas and Austin, if only for the very awesome reason that I have completely and perfectly regained a Texas accent. No doubt I will lose it just as completely in a few days, when I continue on to Orlando for the Christmas holidays, but I honestly thought I would never again have used “y’all” and “fixin’ to” in the same sentence. In fact, I think the drawl I have developed in the past 24 hours is more pronounced than any I ever had when living here.

Well here is to you, Cedar Hill (as I switch figuratively to a personificatory monologue), to memories good and bad, to the overblown class, racial, and pastime distinctions that ruled my high school (dumb petty shit), to the friends I haven’t talked to in forever but am able to hang out with now as if I never moved to both coasts, to Mr. Jim’s pizza, to the wonderful haven of Dangerously, Ignorantly Nationalist Christian Fundamentalism that is North-Central Texas, and to the weather that changes its damn mind every two seconds. I’ll admit that you sucked me back in for a while, and that I was completely unprepared for both how you have changed and how you haven’t, how you have grown and how you haven’t. I’ll have to give you a bit more respect, I guess, more of a place in my story as I tell it. But for now it’s goodbye, and maybe I’ll see you again in some years.