Do You Recognize Me?
The tricks of time and distance
“Do you recognize me?” The woman in front of me asked with a tentative smile.
In all honesty, I didn’t. At least not right away.
I had just finished speaking at an author’s event in my hometown. For the fifteen minutes that words came out of my mouth, my eyes were scanning the crowd, searching for familiar faces. Every time I had visited my hometown in recent years, I’d done the same thing. Walking along Main Street, I would search the faces that passed me. Did I know them? Did they know me? I really had no idea, just as with this woman in front of me.
Yes, you can go home again, but when you’ve been away for decades recognition fades. The lack of anonymity I had growing up in a small town has been replaced by its opposite. I am now near anonymous in my first home and, in a way, that haunts me.
***
Like many, I left my hometown for the first time when I went to college. It was a monumental decision that I struggled to make. My family’s roots run generations deep in that place. We were and continue to be part of its connective fabric. Mind you, at first, when I left for college I wasn’t really gone-gone. I was only a few hours away, so there were many weekend trips back and forth which meant that my face was still known on the city’s streets and I still knew everyone that greeted me.
Then I got married and while that doesn’t always mean leaving everything behind it did for me, at least physically. You see, I married a sailor, which meant that I married the United States Navy, and as their old slogan goes: Join the navy, see the world. When we moved away from California for the first time, tears streamed down my cheeks. I grieved because I said goodbye to my family. I also grieved because I was leaving the known and heading into the unknown. There would be no knowing recognition, no warm and familiar hellos as I walked through town. I would be anonymous. I was leaving familiarity, and all the comforting emotion it carries, behind.
And yet, I survived.
In fact, I survived so well that I thrived as our married life took a 180-degree turn and we ended up spending eighteen years overseas, bouncing from country to country. That first difficult move out of California helped me build strength and resiliency. I embraced the power of anonymity with every consecutive move. Over the years, I was able to find not only myself but also new versions of home every place we landed.
However, there is always a part of us that craves being recognized in the places we hold dear. Especially the place where we began.
***
“I didn’t know if it was you,” the woman continued. Short cropped silver hair. A stylish black outfit set off with a colorful scarf. “When they advertised this event they used your married name, but then you got up to speak and mentioned who you were and I thought, could it be?”
Bells of recognition went off in my head, but still I struggled because the faces I searched for in my mind were the ones held in amber, not the ones there that day. The ones, who like me, were thirty years older.
“You used to work for me, in my dress shop.”
The moment she said that, the sparks ignited a fire in my brain. The years faded and I saw in front of me my first boss. I gave her the biggest hug because I recognized her…and because she recognized me.
I love this so much. There is so much power in being known, but also such bittersweetness in returning to a place that shaped you and finding that both you and that place have changed in ways big and small.