Can't Go Home

*Some friends of mine recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of their graduation from high school. My 20 year reunion is next year, which, thousands of miles away, got me thinking about the subject of going home.

I am from a small town in central Minnesota. I was not born there; I was born in Illinois. However, my parents are both from Minnesota, and their parents are from Minnesota. My parents just happened to move to Illinois before I was born for my dad's job, and then they moved back to Minnesota when I was three. After a few months in an apartment in town, we built and moved into a house in the country at the end of a mile-long dirt road, where I spent all of my childhood, and where my parents still live to this day.

While this house was still being built, I met a boy a year older than me who would be my friend all throughout my youth, and soon met two other boys around my age who would be long term friends too. We spent our daylight hours riding our bikes back and forth on the dirt road, running through the woods, climbing trees, sledding in the winter, eating popcorn, watching Scooby-Doo on TV and playing football and baseball in our big, green yards. Although we each eventually also acquired a group of friends in our own grade, when we got older we stayed friends, and sang in choirs, ran track, hung out at church youth group, occasionally went to movies and even got into a minor car accident or two, one of which was on a different dirt road.

It was in junior high that I first made a few of these other friends. For instance, on the first day of seventh grade art class, the boy I was assigned to share a desk with turned to me out of the absolute clear blue and asked--I'm not sure what was going through his head at the time--if I had seen the 1983 NCAA Basketball Championship Game between North Carolina State and the University of Houston. I had. He would become my best friend growing up, and we spent our time watching basketball, playing basketball, hanging out in his basement, playing tennis all day in the heat of the summer, going to a Twins game instead of Prom and running, running, running. We went our separate ways after graduation, but we remained friends, visiting each other at our colleges, playing and watching more basketball and doing shameful things like attending a Bryan Adams concert.

There wasn't much to do in my small town. There was a dilapidated movie theater of sorts where I remember seeing a Billy Graham movie once, which should tell you all you need to know about the number of new releases that came to town. I went cruising once or twice with some friends, but even that required going to the next town over, as our town only had one stoplight (there are more now). There was the occasional party with the usual underage drinking fiascoes, but I wasn't much interested in that. I mostly spent my time running, especially my last two or so years of high school.

Growing up, I saw the same people day in and day out. You could find most of the kids in my kindergarten class picture in my high school yearbook too. The adults at church I thought were so old--Sunday School teachers, friends of my parents--are still there, and not altogether that old. Some of them came to my wedding--12 years ago today--which was held in the back yard of my parents' country house, the same house we moved into when I was three, the same house where my parents still live.

It would be a shame if I couldn't visit my home town again.

And this, to me, is the crux of the matter in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict: so many people can't go home.

Like the recently retired shop owner up the street from our apartment. At the same age as I was running around in the woods and watching Scooby-Doo, he was running from his home in Jerusalem, dodging explosions and making his way to Amman with his family. He has never been back. Or, like the guy I know who runs a pool hall here. As I left my hometown and went off to college, he also left his--I can't remember which one--to cross the Jordan River and study at the University of Jordan. Unfortunately for him, though, that was in 1967, and the Six-day war broke out soon after he left. He has never been back.

These are just two stories, of hundreds of thousands more, and if you find yourself on the fence on this issue, or unwilling to voice anything but support for Israel, you should think about the people who can't go home. There are around 700,000 from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and around 300,000 from the 1967 Six-Day War, not to mention their descendants. Because like me, these are people who were raised in a place, made friends in a place and went to school in a place. They ran around the historic, cobble-stoned streets of Jerusalem, played in the waves on the beaches of Jaffa and tended sheep on the lush grass of the Galilee. They saw the same shopkeepers day in, and day out. I even bet some of them, like me, got married at the house they grew up in. Sure, the political leaders of the Palestinians may not be angels, but neither are the Israelis. And once you strip away the political shenanigans and the emotional response to the failed and depraved tactics of suicide bombings and katyusha rockets, as well as the reflexive response by so many in my country to support Israel no matter what the situation, and get to the core of the issue, what you find are people who were forced out of their homes or who fled in fear--villages sometimes razed in the process--and who now can't go back.

I live a long way from my home town right now. I would miss it, though, if I couldn't go back. I would be angry if someone else lived in my home there, after taking it from me. I would be sad that all I had left were the memories. Wouldn't you be?