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I am one of those people who moved away from my home town soon after high school graduation. Yes, I am guilty of having left the place I called home for most of the first 20 years of my life. I left at first to attend college, so that wasn’t too much of a blow to the esteem of my home town friends. But when I officially moved to accept employment outside of my home county, I was suddenly escalated to the status of a home-town traitor.
Small towners and small countians don’t take lightly to anyone leaving their roots to try and better themselves. Some consider it a slap to the face of those who would never leave their roots, even if it means they would forever wallow in poverty, job furloughs, and financial insecurity. But to move back to your home town after your retirement, that is a totally different and equally disdainful display of your disrespect and sin against your home town.
Moving back home must be considered the cardinal sin of all home-towner sins because apparently it is perceived by the hard-core home-towners as an act of rubbing their noses in your abdication of home-town citizenship. They seem to look upon your return as if you only came back to show them various signs of your success. By all means, never and I mean never build a new home when you return to your home town. This will give cause for much resentment and local discussion of how you are just showing-off by building that big house out yonder on the edge of town where everyone can see it. Also, you must keep your mouth shut for at least the first ten years after returning to your home town. If you don’t, you will be labeled as a big mouth know-it-all who is trying to tell everyone else that they don’t know as much as you. Heaven forbid that you commit this sin against your former friends in your home town.
You should never be surprised when you start hearing what a bad person you are and that so and so was telling everyone in your home town and the county what a low-life you are and all of the bad things you have done since you exited your mother’s womb. When you ask the name of the person who knows so much about you, don’t be surprised when you learn that you have never met that person and therefore they have never met you. Don’t bother making the statement that the person couldn’t possibly know anything good or bad about you because the two of you don’t know each other, because home towners don’t want to hear such a flimsy excuse and would much prefer to hear why you are such a butt-head so they too can spread the good news about the fellow who thought he could come home.
If you are an ex-home towner who made it big as a professional athlete, none of these home town rules apply to you. You have to understand that your home towners felt they had a certain amount at stake in your professional sports fetes and your successes were their successes. Therefore, when you returned home and built your huge mansion that was a sign of their successes as well as yours and it was perfectly alright, as well as expected, that you should build such a mansion as a show of not only your success, but of their success as they lived through you. This is a show of a certain unique sophistication that is only found to exist in the minds of true and blue home towners.
If this story has a lesson, I suppose it would be:
“The adage that you can never go home is both true and false. You can go home, but never go home with the intent to stay, as in live the rest of your life back in your home town. It is alright to go home for a visit occasionally but don’t stay more than a week at a time, or else you will arouse suspicion that you have moved back home. The primary advantage to not moving back home is that by not doing so you retain your ability to have a home town where you can return to when the urge strikes you. Just remember to not get carried away with your love of your home town to the point where you might do something crazy like moving back, building a house, participating in community activities, joining a church, and making comments about local politics.”