You can’t go home again and again and again

SHERWOOD KIRALY

Now and then you think of going back where you used to live, to walk

where you walked before. The other day I returned to my last four

previous residences.

It was easy because they were all within the city limits.

People who make it to Laguna sometimes move, but they rarely move

out. You might outgrow your room, but you don’t outgrow the town.

Before digging in on Alta Laguna Boulevard, I lived on Aster

Street, Griffith Way, St. Ann’s Drive and La Costa Court. This last

one is off El Toro Road and only in town by a couple hundred yards

and a technicality, but they’re all Laguna and our kids grew up in

them.

The other day I walked around these places again, in some cases

for the first time in years. I had lived here, behind the Cottage

restaurant on Aster Street ... here, beyond the baseball field on St.

Ann’s. And yet at none of these sites had anyone put up a plaque.

I didn’t knock, or ask to go inside anywhere. I tried that a few

years back in Hinsdale, Ill., in the house where I grew up. You go in

and it’s all wrong; it’s full of somebody else’s stuff.

This trip was pleasant, and so were the neighborhoods, but the

tenor of the afternoon was nostalgic, you know, slightly sad, as it

tends to be when you go over old ground, because the time is past,

after all. A chance encounter altered the tone.

Griffith Way is a cul-de-sac below Park, in a gully behind the

high school.

It’s a good area for kids, since cars can’t go through, and there

are paths and trees and some brush and scrub leading up to Park.

On this day two shirtless little boys were running around in

sneakers, reminding me of my son Keaton and his pal Willie at that

age.

I was about to walk up the steep dirt path to Park when I was

accosted by the boys, the more assertive of whom said, “We saw a

coyote.”

I was surprised. “I used to live here but I never saw a coyote.”

The boy said the coyote was little and ran away. Then he looked up

at me hopefully and asked, “Are you a jungle man?”

I had on black shoes, a green shirt and tan jeans. Even if I’d

been in a loincloth it wouldn’t really have been happening. But this

boy, as Keaton did a few years earlier, had transformed his

neighborhood into Adventureland and was willing to cast me in it.

Robin Williams would have answered yes and done something to back

it up; I wasn’t sharp enough. We parted amiably anyway, and I went

home revived. Time has passed, yes, but you’re never washed up as

long as some kid thinks you could be a jungle man.