Last week my 5-year-old preschooler went on his first-ever overnight adventure with Dad. It was a three-day, two-night trip to New York City and vicinity. We drove to my cousin’s house in Connecticut last Thursday to spend an evening before heading for the Big Apple the next morning.

Although it seems counterintuitive, Willie and I wanted to get a late start last Friday. The cost of off-peak round-trip tickets to Grand Central Terminal for people leaving after 9 a.m. is less than half what it is for those who absolutely, positively have to get there during regular business hours. That meant we had some time to kill before heading to the railroad station, so I thought I’d take my boy to see the neighborhood where I had grown up.

As we drifted past the house where I spent virtually all of my childhood, I saw from the name on the mailbox that the residents there were the very same people who had bought the place from my mother 27 years ago. It was at that moment I made an uncharacteristically impulsive choice: I decided to go knock on the door.

A woman answered and graciously invited my son and I inside. I felt as though I were stepping back in time. I was 3 back when I had entered the house for the first time, in 1960. But I hadn’t been inside it since my mom had sold it December of 1984. I vividly remember my last night in the only permanent home I had ever known; I spent it alone in the cold, dark, emptiness on the floor of my ex-bedroom, huddled inside the sleeping bag Santa had hauled down the chimney of that very house when I was just 8 years old.

The lady who invited us in couldn’t have been friendlier. We took a walk around the grounds as she brought me up to date on the changes she and her late husband had made to the place. The old home plate from the town Little League park that our neighbor had dug up and transplanted to our back yard in 1965 was long gone, but thanks to a nearby rock that was too gigantic for even a man as determined as my father to move, I was able to identify the precise spot where it had been. For years I pitched to Dad every night after dinner; he dutifully crouched down behind that plate holding our hand-me-down John Roseboro catcher’s mitt as a target. Even though he wasn’t unusually athletically inclined, I’m quite sure that glove wore out before he did.

I barely recognized the kitchen where my mother prepared three mouth-watering meals a day for nearly a quarter of a century; it had been technologically and tastefully updated since our family left. The back porch my father built more than four decades ago had been converted into a room for the current resident’s feathery pets; there were over five dozen birds living there, and all were extremely well cared for. The bay window in the dining room had been replaced by some sliding glass doors, but the fireplace my father and my uncle had put up brick by brick was still there. The Sycamore sapling we planted in the backyard in Grandpa Young’s memory after his death in 1969 was now thriving and gargantuan, as was the holly bush, which we had transplanted from Aunt Edna’s yard earlier in the 1960s. However, several other trees were long gone, victims of time, disease and/or progress.

The dwelling at 28 Austin Drive was no longer my home, but it was clearly every bit as warm and wonderful a place as it was when our family inhabited it. The woman living there now has done a wonderful job of making it hers. The 45 or so minutes my son and I spent visiting there were truly magic. Thomas Wolfe was wrong; you can go home again, if only briefly.

Willie and I had a marvelous day in New York; we rode the subway, visited the Natural History Museum, and interacted with a wide variety of people, every one of whom was friendly and helpful. But in retrospect the highlight of the day clearly came before we even got on the train to the city. When we got back to Fairfield last Friday night we were exhausted; I barely had the energy necessary to brush my teeth before turning in. 

The last thing I remember doing was looking at my beautiful son, thinking of my late parents and the marvelous childhood they gave me, and feeling good all over. Then I lay down on my cousin’s couch and fell asleep, beneath the sleeping bag Santa had brought me when I was 8 years old.

— Andy Young teaches in Kennebunk and lives in Cumberland.