You Can’t Go Home Again
Thomas Wolfe borrowed the phrase “You Can’t Co Home Again” from another author (with permission) so I will do likewise, but with no ability to get permission from the long-since deceased Thomas Wolfe. In fact, his novel with that name was published posthumously in 1940, so there are all sorts of permissioning issues involved right from the get-go. The story is about a writer who has achieved some degree of success writing about his family and home town, only to find that he has thoroughly pissed off the whole lot of them with one reference or another. Wolfe seems to have been prone to backward-looking contemplation since his other great novels included Look Homeward Angel and Of Time and the River and they are both autobiographical and cover Wolfe’s youthful perceptions of his home town of Asheville, North Carolina. Asheville is a town about thrice the size of Ithaca, which is where this particular angel looks homeward bound.
I have purposefully given myself five full days in Ithaca for this trip since I knew I would be alone (Kim has her semiannual Encore choral performance this weekend) and that would leave me more free to roam wherever my home town inclinations might lead me. I only have a few fixed appointments and they are mostly social in nature. We (with cousin Pete and Nancy) have already done our waterfall scavenger hunt and collected the minimum of five that we set as our goal. Since there are 100 waterfalls within 10 miles of downtown Ithaca, that was actually not such an accomplishment, but it did tick the box on the naturalist checklist. I have saved the visits to the Cornell campus until this afternoon, when I will attend the dedication ceremony that prompted this entire journey in the first place. I will go early to both secure nearby parking (always the biggest challenge on a campus like this), but also because this is reunion weekend and there are literally thousands of returning alumni wandering around campus trying to recapture memories of their days of glory in their youth. On my long list of things to avoid at all costs is going to the Arts Quad where there are numerous reunion tents set up where lots of gathering and drinking takes place and there is rarely a chair to be found. The good news is that enough alumni have come up with the not-so-innovative notion of sponsoring a bench with their names attached, that a place of repose is usually available nearby.
One of the big intentions of this visit was to “get rid of my heebie-jeebies” about Cornell and my unceremonious departure form my Homeward Bound home of 25 years by virtue of my “eviction” at the hands of the Cornell Real Estate Department several years ago. Ithaca has always been the closest thing to a home base for me through my years of expatriate existence in my youth, my educational years (both undergraduate and graduate) and my post-graduate years, right into and through my major donor years. Cornell has graduated over 300,000 people since its founding in 1865 and that includes over 15,000 graduates of its business school since it was founded in 1946. There are about 700 Foremost Benefactors and Builders of the University commemorated on the stone wall of McGraw Tower Terrace and 16 members of the Johnson Graduate School of Management Hall of Honor and I have my name and face on both. Given that my children are third-generation Cornellians and I spent 10 years on the faculty, I would say that I have been a committed Cornellian and very much want to continue to be one. In some ways, my relationship with the University and especially the business school is unchanged in terms of loyalty and reverence on my part. They too have kept in touch with me and made an effort to stay connected to me. At a recent ceremony at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, I saw Kraig Kayser, the current Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University. He was aware of my kerfuffle with Cornell, which centers around my Homeward Bound property of 25 years. He wanted to sit and get all the gory details, but I declined (against his protestations) since I am trying to put that behind me and focus on loving Cornell once again.
A critical step in that process was going home again to Homeward Bound to bring that chapter to full closure. Naturally, there is always a story to be found in such moments in life. When I bought the leasehold to Homeward Bound in 1996, I hade a goodly amount of renovation work to do to bring the rather derelict property to acceptable standards. The three buildings (house, barn and shed) were quite ramshackle with both the barn and shed completely lacking foundations and the house sitting on a century-old stone foundation. That gave me an opportunity to zero-base the design and configuration of the property and that effort required a zoning variance or two to accomplish. My team of contractor and building supervisor submitted my proposal and attended the planning meeting without me. That might have been a mistake since the opening salvo from my team was that I was a “wealthy, NYC, Cornell Alumnus”. If they had said that I was a convicted child molester, it might have raised fewer eyebrows. Despite hitting every nerve that exists in this “town v/s gown” community, my requests were granted and permission to renovate was granted. The biggest antagonist at that meeting way my neighbor Clover Drinkwater (a name I could not have invented in my cleverest moments), who I had yet to meet. Over the years, my family and I have become very friendly with Clover, and as a vital sportswoman who is now retired from her lawyerly ways, she remains the guardian of the small two-house sub-community on Warren road.
Yesterday, I stopped by Homeward Bound with Pete and Nancy, who both resided at the home for 6 months during the building of their current home, and acted as caretakers for the home over 20 years of my absentee ownership. I had learned that the new tenants had already run afoul of Clover through a very similar planning department zoning variance committee meeting, this time having less to do with general renovations of the property and more to do with their outfitting the carriage house with a kitchenette to enable them to rent that outbuilding as an Air-B&B suite. Clover does not appreciate that idea. The young family with three small children was at home and was pleasantly surprised by our visit since they had numerous property questions to ask that the University Real Estate Department was unhelpful in addressing. Between the three of us, it is fair to say we know everything about that property…and perhaps about Clover as a neighbor.
We all enjoyed visiting the old homestead and admiring the redecoration and renovation of the house to meet the young family’s needs. The visit truly exorcized most of the Homeward Bound demons that lurk in my soul. But since I believe Clover reads my blog stories and told me before the visit that she is still “feuding” with the new folks, I may have left a few demons on the grounds. I am reminded that Thomas Wolfe writes in You Can’t Go Home Again in a way that upsets his old neighbors, but being the eternal optimist that I am, I am hoping that Clover reads this and takes the opportunity to bury the hatchet. I will remind her that all three of my kids and Pete & Nancy’s as well have been known to use that house and pool to do some epic partying and we still managed to remain good and neighborly friends for a quarter-century. So, not too get too sappy, but perhaps I can say to her, look homeward, angel since we all want to be able to go home again sooner or later.