Impact of home

Editor’s note: Mike Masterson is under the weather. The original version of this column appeared April 8, 2003.

Aperson’s birthplace and the impact it has upon consciousness can leave an imprint in the human spirit as indelible as the tiny lines of our fingertips.

Inspired by positive and negative, the memories and experiences from our initial home carry with them the powerful longings for what was and what might have been.

Home, for many, is more than where the heart lies. But why is that? For many reasons, but largely because it is the place where we first grasped that we were even here. Home represents the seed whence sprang the buds of each sensory experience and memory of reality inside our fragile and cumbersome bodies.

Perhaps this is why the gravitational pull toward these Ozarks and the town of Harrison has always surged within me like a springfed mountain stream. Its drawing power is centered in the blended recollections of childhood I have toted around like the contents of a frayed duffel bag for decades. The bag contains feelings generated by the unconditional acceptance of an extended family as well as cherished friendships from youth.

All I can tell you for certain is that as I intentionally strayed far from these mountains during the aspiring years of my career, I always felt drawn back to the spiritual comforts they bring. I’ve always believed that allure had as much to do with the embracing nature of the hills themselves as it did with memories and emotions.

Life for me feels fully connected here. You may well share similar experiences when you return to your birthplace. I know others of my age feel much as I do about this sense of belonging.

Years ago, four close friends in their mid-50s who had spent much of our Harrison childhood together decided to convene an annual weekend reunion on Bull Shoals Lake.

As part of the plan, we pitched in and purchased a 1965 bottle of port wine to commemorate our graduation year from high school. We decided that the last survivor among us would spend a warm springtime afternoon consuming the bottle in a reflective toast to the departed three.

We always take a group picture beside the lake at these annual weekends. This year, to recognize the youths who will never know such reunions, we chose to snap the photograph in the war memorial park in nearby Lead Hill. Located near the lake, this hamlet with a population of 88 was a Boone County landmark on the lake just north of our hometown. A headstone there contained five names of those killed in World War II and Korea.

Only a few minutes earlier, we had shared breakfast inside the town’s vinyl-and-linoleum cafe. The breakfast special was a hunk of ham and two eggs with hashbrowns and biscuits for $4.95. The talk around us over coffee had been of the coming turkey season, the unpredictable spring weather and catching bass.

Even our continually pouring waitress, who looked and twanged a bit like Loretta Lynn, joined in the conversation. She was asking us “sugars” what any of us might know about the artificial “red wriggler” lure she’d just bought to use in the nearby lake. And she was serious.

Being in this cafe with those from home chuckling and talking around me was as authentic and unpretentious as an Arkansas hillbilly like myself could appreciate. Here we spoke of classroom pranks and ninth-grade teachers we all knew, and of mutual friends who’ve come and gone. Only others who carry such comparably long memories are able to share your lifetime’s history. That alone makes such friends a gift.

Home also is where those who engineered my brief time here now rest. Mom and Dad, both departed years ago, lie side by side in Harrison’s Maplewood Cemetery alongside my maternal grandparents. I stopped to visit them while driving back from this year’s reunion. I try to do that a couple of times each year so I can sit and recall their many good qualities, like the way they smiled and the tenor of their voices.

Up on that breezy hill, I also make it a point to look around at the thousands upon thousands of familiar last names engraved in marble for as far as the eye can see. They comprise a vast army of the departed standing sentinel beneath a canopy of maple trees that glow red and gold each fall. They include aunts, uncles, best friends, golfing buddies and the doctor who delivered me in a downtown clinic that has become a bank parking lot. Only a blink ago, these were the everyday people who laughed, cried, worked, worried and played in my hometown.

Now they look into the homes and businesses as their descendants take their turns at life’s oars. Strangely, the revelation of such local history fills me with a profound peace. And I realize that as each generation comes and goes, all continues to unfold exactly as it is supposed to at home in the Ozarks.