Yesterday, I had a piece in The Spectator World on growing up, inspired, like a few recent pieces here, by my trip to New Jersey earlier this month. These visits—to my parents, the house I grew up in, my hometown, my best friend and his house—always make me think a lot.

This piece, as it happens, features my best friend’s house quite a bit. (He reads this newsletter; I hope he likes this one.) We met up during the day to drive around Edison, New Jersey, and its Oak Tree Road corridor, sometimes known as Little India. That was fun, as are all the road trips we do when I’m up there.

We got back to my parents’ house in the afternoon, and my friend went home, but he said if my wife and I wanted to stop by the pool at his parents’ place, he’d be around. Who could say no to a pool night after a long, hot day on the road?

We got there, rung the doorbell like old times, were greeted by his parents, and sat around the kitchen table for maybe half an hour. It’s a strange feeling, and I suppose a kind of rewarding one, to realize that at one time, I was a kid in relation to these adults, my friend’s parents, and how now we’re just adults along with them.

On a bit of a tangent, it was actually in this very house that it first sort of clicked for that I was truly grown up, back in 2016, when I was about 23 years old. My friend was having a college graduation party, and I came home from grad school to come. (I went to grad school right after undergrad; he was one year younger.) I remember sitting at the rarely used dining room table, with adults I’d grown up with, and just casually being part of the conversation.

Later on, when the food came out, one very hungry fellow literally pushed me aside while I was getting a plate and made his way ahead to the buffet line. I wasn’t upset, I didn’t feel like I had to go to an adult and tell them that so-and-so was mean to me. I just huffed and got my food, and probably mumbled under my breath something like “you freaking idiot.”

Later on, my friend, me, and a few of the other kids I grew up with were sitting out on the pool patio, trying to eat, and the real kids—a gaggle of seven-, eight-, nine-year-olds—kept splashing the patio. Over at the other end of the patio was a table of older folks enjoying cigars and probably reminiscing about old times. “Go play with the kids and get them to stop splashing,” one of them said to us.

Not that long ago, I would have felt like that request had put an obligation on me. I would have run to an adult and told them that so-and-so wants us to play with the little kids but we don’t want to, can you come tell the little kids to stop splashing? Instead we ignored the older folks, and I said, “You go play with the kids.”

Later on, we left my friend’s house and went to one of the other guy’s houses, where within an hour his mother had us raking mulch and attempting to plant a bunch of saplings in parched, hard-as-a-rock ground. Apparently, she’d been planning this yard work all day, and she suddenly saw four able-bodied young men not doing much of anything. None of us wanted to be pressed into labor, but when I realized how impossibly hard the ground was, I said something like, “Look, we’re not going to be able to plant these plants, we’re going somewhere later, we’re not doing this.”

The other guy’s mother (who I also knew growing up) was apologetic, and she even gave us some cash to spend for when we went out later. We ended up going to a ridiculously overpriced pool hall in town and spending all the cash we had.

Still a little growing up to do.

Every once in awhile I still think about that day, and that feeling of realizing that at some point you can just say no, you can challenge adult authority without it being “disobeying.” Being homeschooled, and not being naturally a rebellious person, I probably learned this fairly late. But there are probably people who never learn it at all. I still on occasion feel like some random person’s opinion or request puts an obligation on me. Part of being an adult is having a good sense of when to go along, and when to say “you freaking idiot.”

Anyway, back to my best friend’s house. I’m going to excerpt a long chunk from this Spectator piece, because I can’t say any of this any better here:

After a couple of late-night hours in the backyard pool, still warm from the day’s heat — and a visit from a few raccoons who live in the woods behind the yard — we headed back inside. We poked around upstairs. The house contains a family history. They ended up with exactly as many children as they had bedrooms (not counting the master). My friend was the youngest of three children, and he started with the smallest bedroom; his oldest sister had the largest one. When she moved out, he took her big bedroom, and now she uses his old one when she visits. His other sister, the middle child, kept her original room. She also uses it occasionally. Once, when we were kids, we played tug-of-war with her door, my friend and I on one side and his sister and one of her best friends on the other; we almost split the door in two.

We took a peek in her closet to see if a quirky old board game we used to play when we were ten was still in there. It was. So was her Fisher Price tape recorder. That board game was probably put away for the last time when I was over there as a kid.

Over in my friend’s room, most of the old belongings and decorations were gone, because he lives in an apartment now. But the L-shaped desk that started in his first room is still there; we used to hide under it during sleepovers. Later on, he wrote all sorts of things on the underside about his high school girlfriend (good things!), and there was even a note about a girl I was interested in back in 2010. Then he pulled out a black CD case, zipped it open, and showed me the old collection of PC games, which used to sit above the family computer downstairs in the living room. (Having the computer in a public spot is one thing I particularly miss about the ’90s.)

Now his nieces play many of those same games. Others, like the Army Men game we snuck out to play during a very boring movie night years and years ago, are just bits of nostalgia now. One of them used to be installed on his first laptop, back when they came with CD-ROM drives.

I felt so young, and so old.

It’s really neat to be an adult in the same places I was a child. Whenever I’m in Flemington, I drive to the Amish farmer’s market store, or Shop-Rite, or my old parish of St. Magdalen’s, and I remember being the kid in the backseat, asking if we could go to such-and-such store or buy some particular thing, and hoping the answer would be yes. Now I reenact the same thing as an adult myself, driving to the same store, buying the same favorite things.

Sometimes I come across feelings that I just can’t distill into quite the right words, but I’ve tried here at the end of the piece, especially the last of these three paragraphs. I was writing about going down to my friend’s basement, and just reminiscing, and how it’s the same, but also uncannily different, as it was 20 years ago.

Instead of hoping the parents will open another bottle of wine, or say “time to go,” call us upstairs, and then stand around in the foyer so long that we can slip back downstairs, the parents are already asleep; they retired before 10 p.m. Neither of us has kids yet, but we’re effectively the parents now. We had done the same thing they used to do: we got to the foyer, said our tentative goodbyes, and then I just wanted to take a peek in the basement. Presto, another hour.

Twenty years ago it might have been potty talk. Ten, maybe it was girls. Now we shot the breeze about generators, sump pumps, dehumidifiers, and the price of gas. I still feel a little self-conscious talking about “adult” concerns. Your twenties are an uncanny and beautiful time, when you make that subtle, almost imperceptible shift from a college student whose “home” is still your parents’ to a full adult in your own right.

Instead of feeling like I’m losing my freedom or my childhood, I settle into adulthood with the understanding that I’m reenacting my childhood from the other side. I’m taking the mantle from my parents, inheriting the routines they taught me, doing the errands in the driver’s seat instead of the backseat. When you conflate adulthood purely with individual autonomy, there’s a lot that you miss, and miss out on. Seeing life as a cycle, rather than a lonely linear journey, is deeply comforting.

This feeling of reenacting old routines is probably the thing I miss most about living in the area I grew up; I moved away just at the point when I was understanding myself as grown up, and it would have been cool to spend more time like that.

At one point in the piece I note how this is a kind of innocent NIMBYism, and how losing these random but personally meaningful things—whether my friend’s binder of retro PC games, or a favorite store to a new housing development—really can create a sense of loss, even mourning.

But there isn’t any way to act on that feeling without imposing massive costs on other people. We understand, when it comes to a house, that you can’t keep everything forever, and you can’t live in the same building forever. Circumstances change, finances change, kids grow up. There are hard reasons for these things that come before the feelings. What NIMBYism and restrictive zoning does is it turns a sentimental idea of familiarity into a rigid policy prescription. If you ask people what they want, they’ll tell you, but that doesn’t mean it can be done, or done realistically.

It happens that the family whose house we ended up at that summer afternoon in 2016, where we attempted the futile tree planting, has put their house up for sale. We grew up there too, and I remember the pleasantly shabby vibe of it like I’m still there: the ancient stove, the obsolete family computer where the only video game was a Greek god simulator, the comfy couches in the basement with stuffing flowing out of them. On the laundry room wall, there were scraps of poems and memories, and ages and heights of the kids, written over the years, a little family history in Sharpie chicken scratch. There were sketches etched onto the bricks of the fireplace with cinders. There was a decayed bench somewhere at the edge of the property that inspired a scene in a short story I wrote back in high school. And there were the stick fights in the huge yard, and the welcome Sunday mornings at the local parish, where the pastor said what used to call an “express Mass” in about 40 minutes.

It’s such a strange feeling to see a real estate listing for a house you know that well, and to know that some little part of your old life, some place where so much of it unfolded, is now closed off from being relived. But a new family will buy it, and make their own memories, and it’s beautiful to think of a how a standard building somewhere out in a rural-exurban New Jersey township can hold so much genuine meaning for so many people over the years.

All of this is sort of how I think about my hometown, too, and the question of balancing continuity with growth overall. (I wrote about that recently, too.) I hope it all means something to you, too.

Related Reading:

The Screen Where You Started

A Piece of New Jersey We’ll Never Build Again

Everyone’s a Little Bit NIMBY

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share