I still try to work out when I travel. It’s a reliable routine, and forces a little structure even on to my time off- a “whatever else goes on, I need to do this” task. In the case of my trip home, that means it joins a lot of food-centric tasks:

• Hit up a Wawa
• Hit up Dinos- get a Dino’s Special Italian, send pictures back west for instructional material to those who would put mayonnaise on such a sandwich.
• Smuggle Yeungling beer and Tastykake pie back in a suitcase.

Priorities are important, all.

I’m staying near my old hometown, and the easiest gym to get into is the Jewish Community Center that my parents are still members of. It’s where I went to summer day camp as a kid, and where we went to enjoy the pool in summer. My dad handed me his access card and said, “When you get in there, report back and tell me where everything is. I haven’t been in there in a bit, and they’ve moved stuff around.”

“All things change and we change with them,” but that change is not always radical. It can be slow, in bits and pieces. When it’s a place that you remember being the whole world to you when you were young, what’s changed and what’s remained don’t always mesh in your brain.

I’m driving my dad’s car up and down the street that held the majority of my world through high school. The JCC is on what was a main road out of town if you were willing to pay a private company to use their bridge. Public bridges and causeways to get off the island were available if you were willing to drive two towns over either direction. Walking into the lobby with its polished metal and laminate flooring, I’m haunted for a moment by brown tile floors, brown walls, brass fixtures and 500% less LCD screens. The welcome desk where I utterly failed hitting on the girl behind it as a high-schooler is now enclosed with kindly old women.

When I have trouble with the scanner, an old woman on my side of the table suddenly grabs my wrist with cold thin fingers and jerks my hand out and down so the scanner beeps. It’s a maternal kind of action I’m very not used to anymore, but it feels Okay as quickly as it was unexpected. I’m back in a Jewish neighborhood- of course a bubbe wouldn’t think twice about laying hands on a younger man having trouble with her gyms door, anymore than she might correct her own grandson.

The locker room is newly redone as well- it’s larger, which lounging chairs in front of a TV on one side. Like every other place, there’s the awkwardness of Naked Old Guys, but I’m 40 now. I’m probably someone elses Naked Old Guy in the Locker Room- who am I to judge anymore? As I change, this feels confirmed as a couple old friend greet each other and one offers the East Coast Jewish Guy’s litany- “How am I doin’? Oh, you know. Same bullshit. Same pains. Same business- but it’s good, you know? It’s good.” I hear the echoes of my own responses to my coworkers in the winery. If I am very lucky, this will be my future.

After the workout, I’m waiting in line at the Wawa- itself a to-do item. I finished just at noon, so there’s at least two crews of local workmen getting lunch with their trucks outside. They don’t have anymore of my favorite sandwich, so I tap through the screen and order something different. You order Wawa sandwiches, pay for them with a slip after you finish shopping, and just wait for them to call your number, so I wandered the store where I remembered carrying pocket change as a 12 year old, figuring out how much candy I could buy.

Driving back to my folks place, someone comes out of my grandmothers driveway. It was, anyway. My grandmother passed 13 years ago, and the stone house she lived in has since been sold, leveled, and rebuilt into a nouveau riche pillared monstrosity.

Keep going, farther down the parkway that I’d walk laps off on warm nights when I was home from college. Try not to look past the big church for black and white striped awnings- the house I grew up in similarly leveled, replaced by another white stucco McMansion. It’s the same corner I used to wait at for the bus, though. The same walk to my old grade school. The same supermarket where a surfer bro behind the counter made me first want to be a cool guy that sold cookies- a baker.

The old and new are layered over each other, flickering back and forth like old-fashioned 3-D glasses. Red and blue together, never quite purple. Past and present on top of each other, but neither correct.

The Wawa sub tastes the same, though. So does Dinos. So does the salt air, cold mist, and the sea. It’s weird, strange, cold like the woman’s fingers, welcoming like her grip, and promising like the old Jewish guys patter.

It’ll feel different enough to be wrong, but enough will be left to greet you.

Stay Classy,