Going Home to Mountain View

 

by Pa Rock

Aging Scribe

Most of us, through necessity, establish several homes during our lifetimes.   We grow up in one, or sometimes more, strike out on our own to begin eperiencing life, move around for marriage, family and work-related reasons, and then, if fortune smiles, find a place that suits our elder selves in which to retire and live out our remaining days.   Each of the places we inhabit on the rush through life imprints itself on who we ultimately become, and, to an extent, each of those locations maintain places in our psyches as our "homes."

One of those places which feels like "home" to me is Mountain View, Missouri, where my wife and I had our first professional jobs in the field of education.  It was 1977, and times for teachers were (and always are) lean.  We signed teaching contracts for $7,200 per annum and were pleased when the school board found funding over the summer before we began work to increase that salary to a hefty $7,600.

We arrived in town and moved into a large, rented house in July shortly before school started in August with two young children in tow, a boy who was ready to start kindergarten and a girl who was two years younger than her brother.  By the time we left six years later we were the parents of a third child, a boy who was born in the local hospital, and we were living in a small home which we had been able to purchase through help from my parents.  We had made many friends while we were there and the community had made an impact on our lives.  It was imprinted on my mind as one of the "homes" that I experienced in life.

Now, almost fifty years later, I have had several homes, with two being overseas, and each of those still lingers as a part of who I am today.  Most of them I have probably seen for the last time, but I did make a trip early this week to Mountain View where I relived several memories.   I drove past both of the houses that once were our homes, the vacant lot where the old church that we attended once stood, up and down the main drag of Front Street, past the dozens of businesses, many of which are in buildings that had been repurposed since the 1970's and '80's, and most of which were coated with more vibrant colors of paint that they had been back in the day.

One of the parks still had the old railroad caboose on display, but I didn't stop and walk through it as I did with the kids multiple times when they were little.  Another of the parks still had the outdoor amphitheatre with bench seating leading down to a performance stage and a sign advertising "Music in the Park" on Saturday evenings just as it had five decades earlier.

I drove by the elementary school where two of our kids began their education and the hospital where the third was born.  Our family physician, a young man who had just begun his medical practice, had his office in the rear of that building.  Now he is a much revered retired doctor who takes occasional groups of volunteers to do free medical clinics in Haiti.

Today I am living back in the same county after being away decades and residing in a variety of places, but I am in twenty-five miles or so south of Mountain View and seldom manage to get up there.  The last time I remember being there was in 2021 when several family members and I drove through and stopped for gas as we headed out on a drive toward the East Coast.  That was a hurried drive through - this time I was in more of a lingering and remembering mode.  

It felt good to be home one more time.