Ever wondered what it would be like to move back to the town where you were raised?
Many of us in Gig Harbor have done just that. Like salmon returning to spawn, we’ve come back to our childhood hometown to raise our own children. We’ve come back to be close to grandparents, to take advantage of the area’s excellent schools and to live in a place where our kids can ride their bikes down country roads, where saltwater shimmers through the trees.
Problem is, there’s more traffic on those country roads than there used to be. The Gig Harbor we middle-aged natives returned to is different from the one in which we grew up.
Although our kids go to the same schools, the schools are bigger. Gig Harbor High School, for example, is twice the size it was when I attended. Have I given away my age? Now I get lost in the new hallways.
Way back when, Gig Harbor was a sleepier, more rural place. There was one grocery store. No fast food. No gated communities. Old Gig Harbor was more of a farming village.
Yes, I actually knew people who made their living as farmers. For instance, my grandfather.
The quiet hamlet of the past felt peaceful and removed from other places, more like my idea of the far tip of the present-day Longbranch Peninsula.
There were 20-acre parcels galore. Now we live on smaller lots. We are more connected to Tacoma and the rest of the world. The Gig Harbor I came back to as an adult is livelier, more affluent and more crowded.
Or maybe I’ve just grown up.
Memory plays funny tricks on you in the middle of your life. I thought when I moved back to Gig Harbor 10 years ago, I would run into my high school classmates around every corner.
Of course, in my mind’s eye, they were all still here, doing the same things they’d been doing when I left, not scattered over the country as the successful adults and parents they have really become.
While they’re not around every corner, every once in a while I see a familiar face and memories come flooding back. The memories are sudden and intense. Things I haven’t thought of for years bubble up.
I’m always a little thrilled that anybody can see through my wrinkles and actually recognize the kid I once was. There’s that satisfying feeling of being understood without having to explain everything.
There’s also a funny, secret feeling that I know who these fancy adults really are.
A successful young businessman greets me and immediately I remember how once, as a kid, he laughed so hard that he wet his pants.
A beautiful mother dressed in conservative clothes is still, for me, a giggling third-grader singing her heart out at the top of her lungs.
That’s how it is when you move back — you know everybody as the kid they once were. Or maybe it’s just part of growing older.
Of course, it goes both ways. The people who knew me as a kid have some stories on me, too.
“Remember when you blushed?” says a nice father at a soccer practice. “Even the parting of your hair turned pink!”
I see my kids trying to imagine their plumpish, bossy, middle-aged mom as a young, blushing kid.
They can do it, barely, the same way they can imagine when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Actually, I had forgotten all about blushing.
“It was in front of the whole class,” the nice father insists. “I’ve never seen anyone turn so red in my life.”
Oh, yeah. Now I remember.
When you move back to a town, it’s not only people but places that come with memories attached. That posh new development? Used to be the back end of nowhere.
My grandpa used to talk about when all of Raft Island was for sale — before it had a bridge. Nobody wanted it. Ditto for Kopachuck. If it wasn’t good farm land, what use was it?
Parts of town which have become a classy address once seemed to be way too far out, as in: “You’re kidding! We have to drive all the way there?”
You begin to see the problem of returning to your hometown. Every part of town is, for me, both what it is now and what it used to be.
Sometimes, though, I know exactly why I’m here. The other day, while jogging, I passed an older man out for a walk.
“You a Peterson?” he called, giving my maiden name.
“Yes,” I said.
Amazingly, he’d recognized me as part of my clan just by the look of me. He could see to whom I belonged.
He knew my people! I stopped to chat.
The man, it turned out, knew my grandfather Hans, who immigrated to Gig Harbor in the 1920s and died 10 years ago. In fact, he knew a joke my grandpa used to tell.
In his own impersonation of my grandfather’s thick Norwegian accent, the stranger told me my grandfather’s familiar joke. He got the accent dead-on.
Somewhere between us, I could feel the ghost of my grandpa chuckling, pleased to be remembered, and pleased to find me back here again.
Mimmi Beck is back in her hometown of Gig Harbor. She can be reached by e-mail at MimmiB@aol.com. Have a story to share? Submit one between 600 and 800 words to gatewayeditor@gateline.com.
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