March Mom Madness
March 20, 2004

As Thomas Wolfe wrote, you can't go home again. Well, you can physically, unless your old neighborhood has been razed to the ground to make way for a strip mall full of nail salons.

But even if the old homestead is still standing, chances are things just won't be the same. Every college student has had the strange epiphany of going home to the parents' house at the first holiday break to discover that all the doorknobs seem lower. You need the eyes of a child to view your childhood home as enormous with possibilities, a gateway to the future expanding like an accordion with each new dream.

As freelance cartoonists, Art Boy and I once made a cartoon about the going home phenomenon. A man and a woman are towering above a modest row of tiny Liliputian houses. Says the man, "I haven't been back to the old neighborhood since I was small."

That's the way I feel every time I visit my mom in Hermosa Beach. The house itself is virtually unchanged since those distant days when I met with my Brownie troop there, played Beatle albums day and night, and came running home from high school to watch the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows so I could tell my mom what she'd missed when she got home from work. But I've changed enormously, and perspective alters everything.

We collided head-on with our past lives when we scheduld visits to both our moms last month—sort of a March Madness with Moms. We drove down for a week in Hermosa to help my mom celebrate her birthday on the 13th. After that, while still in a rare (for us) travel mode, we flew to Chicago for a week with Art Boy's mom in suburban Wilmette, Illinois.

On the surface, our childhood experiences couldn't have been more different. I grew up in a neighborhood of small, square, stucco beach houses, with interior walls of painted plaster and the occasional flourish of knotty pine woodwork. My mom's kitchen still has its original blue tiles, and the linoleum-topped kitchen table our family of five outgrew as soon as I got too big for my high chair. The living room walls still bear the same coat of paint—champagne, I believe it was called—that my dad and I put on in the summer of 1966. The cracks in the street that defined the baselines when we neighborhood kids played ball are still there.

By contrast (as Woody Allen's character says of Annie Hall), Art Boy grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting. Sidewalks are broad, lawns are vast and green, and houses are built to last on solid foundations of brick or stone, with wood siding on the upper stories and shutters framing the windows. Backyard gardens come complete with wild bunnies, and interiors are decorated. My mother-in-law, Helen, is a seamstress who works with local designers, and nothing in her house goes uncovered: walls, switchplates, and door frames are papered, tables and beds are skirted, furniture is upholstered in vibrant floral prints or subdued checks.

The television is the focal point in my mom's living room, where I spent my formative years devouring old movies on the late show. Helen's little TV swings discreetly into a cabinet, out of sight, when not in use. A couple of shelves in Helen's sun room are devoted to volumes of religious commentary, and a few design books. My mom's books—mostly fiction and biography—are stacked up to the rafters on any available surface in every room in the house.

Yet the changes wrought in each of our old neighborhoods are eerily similar; both locations are currently viewed as prime real estate. Covetous inlanders are erecting huge streamlined monstrosities of glass and steel in a style I call Gotrocks Moderne on ever available patch of dirt in Hermosa Beach, crowding out the last few funky little stucco beach cottages that stubbornly survive. People have the nerve to drive around in Jaguars. In Wilmette, the ostentation is even more profound—block-wide mansions festooned with columns, gables and art glass, three-story brick fortresses complete with turrets. I saw one giant stone edifice where the turret was actually crenalated. All that was missing was the moat.

But what's weird about going back is not these cosmetic changes, but the way we've changed. As much as we love our moms, we feel alien in their worlds, their lives, their homes, where we haven't lived in so long. Cut off from our normal, busy routine, we fidget, make small talk, look for something to do. We always bring pens, notebooks, sketchpads, but we hardly ever use them. We're not quite ourselves in that foreign environment. Our creative selves are back home in Santa Cruz, and we're always itching to get back to them.

As different as our childhoods were, Art Boy and I have this in common: we were both nurtured with the love and encouragement of our families, the foundation that made the life we've built together possible. For all that fidgeting, we came away from our Month of Moms with a deep appreciation of where we came from, and for what we've managed to become.