This is not my beautiful home

Going home as someone else.

I have been eating this dish for six decades. Gringo tacos at El Fenix in Dallas. © 2025 RIchard DeWald by CC

I am attending the wedding of a couple I have known more than four decades. For reasons both charmingly nostalgic and wisely practical, they elected to use the facilities of our shared high school for it. They met there, they were a couple there, went their separate ways, had separate lives and families, and have now reunited. Yes, it is as made for Hallmark as it sounds.

I am on the periphery of the event itself, no one asked me to do anything official, so as they and their families have been setting up I have been free to just wander around the building and grounds of my high school for the first time in forty-seven years. It is a bit like visiting a graveyard, in some ways literally, there’s a memorial garden now named for one of my former teachers.

I walked past the chapel where I learned, at 16, from a Catholic friar, how to meditate in the same fashion I still practice today. That’s truly where my religious life started, and it is a Catholic chapel. I walked past the rooms where I had my most formative history classes, math classes, and language classes. In my mind these rooms are named for the teacher: that’s Sister. Mary Brian’s room, that’s Ms Crissey’s, that’s Mr. Langbein’s, that’s Sister Miriam’s.

These people are long gone from these halls, so are their students, this is a smaller educational institution now, with more grades, so the suffix “High School” has been replaced by “Catholic School.”. I looked around for pictures of Pope Leo, but I guess they will be hung in the fall.

Visual cues are very powerful, so as I walked around I kept flashing back to the 1970s. I remembered myself there, I remember my emotional body, I remember my feelings. I recognize these memories but they really feel as if they belong to someone else, someone I was but no longer am.

My own recall is highly suspect, I no longer regard my own memory as a finder of fact. I relate my memories faithfully as what is in my brain, but it too often doesn’t line up with the actual documentary evidence when such exists.

For years, I coped with the tragedy of being the neglected only child of profoundly dysfunctional alcoholic parents by lying to myself, and others, about what my family life really was. I had an entire literary canon composed in my brain, a library of half-truths and outright fabulous fictions, to explain to myself and others who I was, and what made me the way I am. It is mind-numbing to realize, all these years later that I kind of really don’t know, and never will know, exactly what happened to me.

Some of my stories are real, others aren’t. Typically, it is the real ones that people don’t believe. My fabulist constructs almost uniformly follow a narrative that is plausible. Much of what happened to me for real was simply implausible, and as a pre-teen and teenager I knew that if I faithfully related it to an adult with the authority, I would be removed from my parent’s custody.

So I kept my mouth shut, and made up stories about my father being out of town so much because he was much more important at work than he was, and even Baghdad Barbie has nothing on my ability to be an apologist for the exploits of my bipolar mother with borderline personality disorder. I could take the most antisocial behavior and interpret it as performative fierce wisdom which mere mortals could not fathom if they didn’t see the value in it.

What was the truth? I don’t know. I did a lot of looking away.

So, when I come back and have these memories and feel distant from them, I do not mean the nostalgic remove of distant personal history. I actually wonder what happened and how that differs from what I remember. I feel as though I am recalling another person’s memory: is that other person mostly fictional?

Maybe. It seems that way, a lot.

This returns again to what I have been pondering about the Sandokai, and many zen ko-an (teaching stories). The introduction to meditation that took place in the chapel of my high school was very real. I also received a solid education in the humanities, particularly literary criticism, within this building that persists today. Obviously, since I am here for their wedding more than four decades later, I made some good solid friends.

But, was I really the victim I otherwise believed myself to be? I slumped around these halls like I did not belong here, like I had to fool people and low-key shoehorn myself into being here. I always felt like I was somewhere I didn’t really belong, so I had to lie to people to make myself belong.

If their picture of me, that I drew for them, is a lie, was I ever here at all?

I do not know. That’s ok. It has to be.