You Can’t Go Home Again… Or Can You?

I just spent 36 hours back in Kansas City. The reason wasn’t a reunion tour or a victory lap. It was a memorial. A friend succumbed to cancer. The kind of gathering no one wants, and yet, the kind that gathers what matters.

As I walked into the church, I half expected a soundtrack to start playing. Maybe something like “Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel — “I’m sitting in the railway station…”  Longing to be someplace familiar.

Instead, I found myself sitting beside Tim and Molly, grade school friends I hadn’t sat next to in almost 50 years. Later, Rockhurst brothers Doug, Paul, Barry, and Blair, men I hadn’t seen in 46 years. We hugged. We shook hands. We tipped a pint for our friend. It felt like last week.

As I drove down State Line, Ward Parkway, Wornall Road, the old melody rose in my head: Take Me Home, Country Roads — John Denver. “Almost heaven…”

Kansas City may not be West Virginia, but memory has its own geography.

I drove past my childhood home. It looked better than when I lived there. Fresh paint. Strong. It survived church parking lot expansion like it had something left to prove.

The church had undergone renovations too — new lines, updated spaces — but somehow it still felt like home.

And for a few sacred hours, I did too.

For a long time growing up, I didn’t.

I was the dirt-poor Hispanic kid trying to find footing among privilege. Self-esteem wasn’t something I carried confidently; it was something I negotiated daily.

But sitting there now, decades later, those old insecurities felt smaller.

Not erased.

Just quieter.

Maybe that’s what Bruce Springsteen meant in My Hometown — when he sings about driving past the textile mill and watching things change. Home isn’t frozen in time. It evolves. And so do we.

There’s a reason Bon Jovi gave us both sides of the debate. In one breath, Who Says You Can't Go Home. In another, the haunting truth that maybe you can’t. Because you can revisit geography. You cannot relive chronology.

The hallways feel smaller. The faces carry lines. The laughter has depth to it now — shaped by careers, children, loss. Even joy has wrinkles. You don’t go back. You just see more clearly.

As we merged onto Interstate 70, I glanced at Tina beside me for the last 43 years of my life. She is not nostalgia. She is home.

We stopped in Mid-Missouri at the newly built home of our son and daughter-in-law. Four grandchildren filling rooms with motion and noise and promise.

We spent time with our grandson, Cole, today. He is home too.

Which makes me wonder… What is home? A street name? A brick building? A pew? A memory? A melody? Or is it people? Maybe home is wherever you are fully known. Maybe home is where the shame loosens its grip. Maybe home is where you feel whole.

For 36 hours, I was home in Kansas City. Not because nothing changed. But because I had. And as the skyline faded in the rearview mirror, I realized something quietly powerful: Home isn’t where you started. Home is where love has met you: past, present, and still ahead.

And somewhere between the pews, the pint glasses, the highways, and the grandchildren, I could almost hear it again — not as a plea this time, but as a quiet truth: Country roads… take me home.

Only now I know — I’m already there.