I wouldn't know my childhood home from a hole in the ground

'You can never go home again, but I guess you can shop there.'

The text came from my brother last week. It was a link to an address on Google Earth.

Followed by my brother writing “Uhh.”

I recognized the address. I had to memorize it when I was a little boy, in case I ever got lost (which happened surprisingly often to me) and had to tell an adult who found me wandering the streets where I lived.

But when I clicked on the link, the ranch-style 1960s house I grew up in in Calgary wasn’t in the photo. The front lawn I used to mow to earn my allowance wasn’t there. Neither was the living room picture window, through which one Christmas Eve I swore I saw Santa’s sleigh in the sky, and dropped my glass of eggnog onto the carpet in shock and terror. Neither were the front steps where one summer afternoon I sold hand-drawn comic books to my friends for a quarter each (which is a quarter more than I’m charging for this newsletter, by the way.)

All of it was gone. Where my childhood home was was a literal hole in the ground, surrounded by dirt, weeds and rocks. It was the empty space that was the most disorienting. You could now see straight through, past the demolished stand-alone garage that had been at the back of the property, to the houses across the back alleyway. 

It was such a stark image that, as shocking as it was, I couldn’t help but laugh. The house hadn’t just been changed or renovated. It was GONE. They say you can’t go home again, but whoever had bought the property had gone to extensive, expensive lengths to make sure of it. 

My sister, who still lives in Calgary, told me this is increasingly common in older neighborhoods like the one I grew up in. Real estate developers buy a property, raze the old house that was built there and build a duplex or other multi-family development on the site.

So I clicked around on Google Earth to see if other houses on the block had been torn down. Nope, all still there, most of them looking about the same as they did when we packed up the van and moved away over 40 years ago. But in the middle of the street, a crater where my house used to be. It was surreal.

When I posted a photo of what I’ll now call “RobHenge” on Facebook, a friend reminded me of the scene from 1997’s “Grosse Point Blank” when John Cusack discovers that his childhood home has been torn down, and an UltiMart convenience store erected in its place. “You can never go home again,” he tells his therapist. “But I guess you can shop there.”

I thought of a scene from Alexander Payne’s 2003 dramedy “About Schmidt” when Jack Nicholson’s Schmidt goes to his childhood home, only to find it’s been replaced by a Tires Plus. He struts around the store to the bewilderment of an employment, reminiscing about where the long-gone rooms of his house used to be. 

I also happened to be reading a George Saunders short story, “Thursday,” in which a lonely old man takes medication that allows him to be immersed in the tactile memories of his youth (“the lovely sounds of the old neighborhood: yapping sales patter from a kitchen-window-perched radio”). Saunders is writing about the hazards of nostalgia and of longing to live in an idealized past – in a wry twist, the old man learns that the boyhood memories he recalls so fondly aren’t even his, but somebody else’s that have been implanted in his mind.

And so, once the surprise had worn off, I wasn’t as bothered by the house being torn down as I thought I might be. The impression my family had left on the house had long faded. It had probably changed hands at least twice more since we moved out, and was surely (god, HOPEFULLY) redecorated in 40 years. When I went by the house a few years ago on a visit to Calgary, the front lawn I used to mow had been replaced by a questionable rock garden. Now that was gone too. 

The truth was that the house I lived in had for a while existed more fully in my mind than it had in the real world. What was torn down sort of resembled the house I remembered, sort of. But it wasn’t the same house.

So, as a new year begins, maybe RobHenge is a welcome reminder to me that things themselves don’t really matter, aside from the emotions and the memories that we attach to them. Those feelings stay with us whether the thing is with us or not.

But if the new owners of the property find a shoebox buried in the backyard with the skeleton of a gerbil inside? His name was Fonzie and I want him back.