Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Trip home good for a laugh

THERE IT IS, the house I grew up in, its gray paint and siding reflecting the predawn glow as I roll slowly past.

I helped my father hang that siding, but otherwise, I hardly recognize the place. It's been six years since my parents sold it and retired to Colorado. I like what the subsequent owners have done with it, though: enclosed the carport into a room, something we should have done back when there were four growing boys competing for any square inch of personal space. Added a rock path through the yard I once mowed so reluctantly. Further change is inevitable, I see: There's a For Sale sign planted under one tree.

I rarely pass this way anymore; I haven't had business on this street for years. But I'm in a reflective mood this morning. I want to see what the march of time has wrought on old Kola Street in Henderson.

My first thought is, it's been more like the stomp of time. This is an aging neighborhood; my parents bought the house in '73 and it was no spring chicken then. Trying to overlay my mental pictures of the street onto the real thing only creates dissonance, so much is different now. Yards have gone to weedy dirt. The house where that strange old coot once lived is barely recognizable, shorn of its distinctive perimeter shrubbery (I still shudder at the memory of him chasing me down the street for spying on his daughters from beneath those bushes).

Not everyone has given in to the decline; they're relandscaping next to my parents' house; a few other properties are as well-tended as they ever were.

Try as I might, I can't conjure up ghost images of little Scott running loose on this street, throwing chinaberries at friends or footballs over passing cars, even though I did such things. That's partly because I'm not sentimental that way and partly because my history on Kola Street isn't confined to my parents' home.

Thanks to some weird karma, my wife and I lived a few years two doors down from my folks. Our house was a dumpy pile nestled in the crook of Kola Street's gentle elbow turn. It featured a cranky swamp cooler and a back yard of sun-baked dirt, its front grass a crispy yellow precursor of the dead lawns that dot the street today.

It felt odd then to have ended up so close to the place I'd spent my youth dreaming of getting away from. The journals I'd kept so faithfully as a kid were loaded with notions of foreign travel, filing elegant dispatches from Africa, living in a larger world. Henderson would be nowhere on my map. Somehow, I didn't recall anything in those journals about living two doors down and raising kids and filing clunky dispatches from Henderson City Hall, my job in those days.

We've lived in other houses before and since, a long autobiography written in addresses and rental checks. Each one represented a redrawing of my map -- Africa? Ha! -- until now it includes almost nothing but Henderson. Talk about the stomp of time; I used to feel almost flat.

But I don't get wistful about that stuff anymore -- I'm not sentimental, damn it! -- and as I roll past the old place, I can't help but chuckle. Look at it now! The house is Pepto pink, the grass is deader than it ever was under my brown thumb, and the side yard is full of junky flotsam, like a split pinata or a permanent yard sale. Ugh! Even if you could go home again, when home is painted intestinal pink, who'd want to? I chuckle some more and drive away.

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