After a long day of sleeping, sweating (I stayed home from work with a fever today), dinking around on the computer and washing dishes, I decided to go back to bed and read for a while. I’m still reading Catcher in the Rye. I got to the part where Our Hero sneaks into his parents’ home in the middle of the night–cause he’s home a couple of days early due to being kicked out of school, and he doesn’t want his parents to find out yet–to see his little sister. That scenario reminded me of the line from the play Our Town. You know the one; “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”

I hadn’t seen that play since I was in junior high, and I wanted to see it again and remember the context of that great line, so I scrounged around a bit and watched the 1940 version of the movie on Google. I didn’t hear that line, but the movie was certainly excellent and moving. The crux of it is that we all sort of zoom through our lives without taking time to even see the people that are closest to us, until it’s too late. And if I’m not mistaken, the ending of the movie was different from that of the play…? I don’t remember the play having a Hollywood happy ending.

After all that, it turned out that the line was not from Our Town after all, but from a poem by Robert Frost called The Death of the Hired Man, which I somehow remember reading in fifth grade–and not really understanding it–but that line certainly stuck with me all this time. It also turns out that I had it slightly wrong. The actual line is this:

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
they have to take you in.


And now that I’m in my mid-thirties, and gone through some pretty hard times, I feel like I understand and appreciate it.

Amazing how certain things you read can stick with you. I read the poem when I was just ten years old, but the line is so strong that it called out to my little brain and then waited for me to come around and discover it again. Re-reading Catcher in the Rye has been a bit like that too. Even though I read it as an adult (albeit barely; I think I was eighteen), and I should have been able to relate to it completely, I hadn’t really started to live yet, so it was just as remote as reading Isaac Asimov or something. Now I actually find myself relating to the confusion, the humor, and even the darkness that seems to jump out from every page.

Makes me want to go back and re-read every book I thought I’d read before.