They say you can never go home, but Tempe writer and performer Kim Porter proves that wrong.
KIM PORTER: I was living in San Francisco when my daughter Colette was born. As she grew, I felt an unexpected urge to show her where I was from, which surprised me because pretty much all the memories of my hometown, Wichita Falls, Texas, were negative.
I’d fled Wichita Falls in the '80s, vowing to never return, and with no family living there anymore I had no obligation to visit.
The first time I watched Colette toddle down a San Francisco hill, pick up momentum, tumble forward, and skid downhill, completely skinning her bare legs, I had an epiphany. All my best hard-won childhood lessons, like how to survive goat-head stickers, wasps, and tornadoes, were useless in San Francisco. And lessons I needed were always learnt in retrospect. For instance; San Francisco toddlers should always wear long pants.
We had such different childhoods. When I was a kid, you could ride all the way to Dallas in the back of a pickup and roam the world unsupervised until dusk. Colette was eating sushi with chopsticks and learning to balance in moving streetcars. My wisdom was wasted.
Still, the longing to show her my roots would not go away. But I reasoned, unless we had a time machine, I couldn’t really show her my childhood, so why bother.
One day, in 2007, when Colette was 7, while on a road trip, I convinced my husband to divert our route a few hundred miles to stay overnight in Wichita Falls.
As soon as we got to town, I started pointing out where things used to be: “That was a Dairy Queen, that was an empty field, that’s where the 7/11 was before the tornado, and over there is where they rebuilt it, and where my mom worked after the divorce.”
We drove past the house I’d grown up in, which was so tiny it looked like a scale model, then headed to the park near the lake where I’d spent most of my lonely childhood sitting atop the slide, trying to avoid the chaos of a broken home. The park was still filled with the same equipment we’d played on in the 1960s, albeit repainted a drab brown.
As I watched Colette struggle to climb the same chain ladder to the top of the same slide I’d struggled to climb at the same age, something shifted. I felt understood. I was seeing back in time, seeing myself at age 7, before my family had crumbled, when I was still innocent. I’d found that time machine.
Suddenly I wanted to show her everything great: the swinging bridge, Fun Land, the prairie dog town. I wanted her to taste all our best foods: a beanie burger, a chicken fried steak and those red tacos from Casa Mañana. She marveled at all of it.
We stayed for 24 hours. As we drove past the city limits sign Colette cried from the back seat. “I’m just sad because what if we never see Wichita Falls again. I love Wichita Falls?!”
And suddenly I loved it, too.
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