Insight: Reminiscing about home

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Finding home for me is much more than the advice Dorothy received in “The Wizard of Oz” film of closing her eyes, tapping her heels together three times and thinking to herself “There’s No Place like Home.”

Ed Pierce stands by his boyhood home in
Brighton, New York in September. He lived
in that house from 1958 to 1966.
PHOTO BY NANCY PIERCE  

A few weeks ago, my wife Nancy and I drove to Henrietta, New York where members of my high school class were gathering for a picnic and reminiscing about the old days. I was back in the place where I grew up almost six decades ago and for some of my classmates, it remains home as they never left.

For me, although a great deal has changed there, it’s essentially the same place. We stopped and took photos outside our family’s old residence in Brighton, New York where I learned to ride a two-wheel bicycle in the driveway and where a neighbor’s boxer dog crashed through a glass storm door trying to get at one of our dachshunds in the mud room connecting our kitchen and the garage when I was 7.

As we drove away, Nancy had me stop and she selected a book from a Little Free Library on what used to be the corner property of the people who owned that boxer dog.

Back in 1966, we moved from the home on that street to a brand-new house in the next town over because my father didn’t like driving in the snow in the winter for four miles to get to his job as a mechanical engineer. Our new house was less than a mile and a half away from his job and so I wanted to take a drive there and show Nancy where he worked. But unfortunately, the building where he worked had been torn down years ago and now a U.S. Post Office is there.

In checking into our hotel, neither of the desk clerks were aware that at one time the property the hotel was on was a large landing strip for Cessna and other small aircraft. In fact, Hylan Drive is named for the man who owned the airfield back when I was a child.

Later during our visit to the area, we were driving after dinner to see my Aunt Barbara a few towns away from our hotel and I showed Nancy a building by the bridge in Fairport, New York where my mother’s friend opened an Italian restaurant called The Cottage. It had fabulous food, and it was the first restaurant I ever ate at that served Eggplant Parmesan and I liked it. The place closed early in the 1970s and I don’t know what’s in there now.

Across the road from there was the old gas station that my cousin Pete operated in the early 1960s. He eventually opened his own car repair business in East Rochester and now his son runs the business.

We passed the location where I would ride my bike with my brother as a major shopping center called Pittsford Plaza was under construction in 1963. It’s still there and next to a small brick building in the parking lot where my parents would visit their bank on Friday nights is a huge Barnes and Noble bookstore.

Landmarks are the same. I spotted the old smokestack of the long-closed Iola sanitarium where my mother would threaten to drop me off if I continued to argue with her. That’s only a short way from the Rochester airport, and my backyard where I was playing after school in 1962 and I heard a large “Boom” only to watch on the 6 o’clock news that an airplane had crashed there while landing.

On that Saturday afternoon, we stopped by the Catholic school that I attended from first grade to seventh grade. It’s still a Catholic school but has a different name. The east side of the school is now a playground, but students had none of that when I went there in the 1960s.

Before leaving we drove to Sea Breeze by Lake Ontario and visited a restaurant called Don’s Original. When I was a kid, it was Don & Bob’s but now both of those men are gone yet the building looks just as it did when my mother went there as a small child in the 1920s. The food was to die for and tasted just like it did in 1977 when I stopped there while in the U.S. Air Force on my way to my new duty station in Germany.

Nancy and I left early on Sunday morning and we made good time traveling back, first on the New York State Thruway to Albany, then over to Springfield and Worcester, Massachusetts and through Portsmouth, New Hampshire and back to our house in Maine.

Despite being nostalgic for the places I lived long ago and knowing that many of the people I knew back then are no longer around, I came to realize that home for me is not dredging up some vivid memories of my past existence, the things I did way back when, or how much things have changed at locations I used to know decades ago.

The plain and simple truth is that home for me is what I have taken with me, not what I have left behind. <