Going Home

For many years in my late teens and early married life, I sang in a mixed choir in my home town.  Occasionally the standard 4-part harmonies would give way to 3- or 4-part male-voice arrangements, and one of the earliest that I learned was a negro spiritual called Going Home.  The words, by William Arms Fisher, are set to the largo from Anton Dvořák's New World Symphony.  To my shame, I hadn't realised until refreshing my memory this week that it was in fact a funeral hymn, telling of finding familiar faces in Heaven.  However, I have always associated it with feelings of peace.

All of this makes even more strange an experience I had on Tuesday afternoon.  As readers will know from last week's post, I had been visiting my cousin over the new year, and I was on my way home from there.  The visit had been a very pleasant one but it had come to its natural end and I was comfortable about leaving to come home.  During the journey, my thoughts kept going back to a time some nineteen years ago, when I was also returning home after a winter holiday.  It was the last week of December and, although I have no wish to dig up the past, suffice to say that it had been one of the least happy Christmases of my entire life.

On that occasion my return journey had been by air and train; this time I was driving.  Then I was coming home after an uncomfortable holiday to face trauma and upheaval; this time couldn't be more of a contrast.  Why then, should my mind link the two?  And why should that tune, with its feeling of peace come to mind alongside such an opposing recollection?  I shared some of these puzzles with a friend yesterday, but we got no further than agreeing that memory is a very strange phenomenon, and gives us more surprises the older we get.

So, after the puzzles of the journey, I'm now picking up one by one the threads of life back home in the First Garden City.  Wednesday morning was very much routine, with the midweek church service followed by shopping and, on this occasion, other errands in the town as well.  Yesterday I was volunteering at the inter-church project to help the homeless and vulnerable people in our community.  On the home front, all the main strings to my life are being taken up again, and in many ways life will be fully back to normal by this time next week.

The one remaining question is New Year Resolutions.  I don't normally make any ... they're usually only too easy to break!  However, if I'm forced to pledge myself to something in that line, I would say that I'm planning to reduce wasted time, whether that be spending time on activities or disciplines that are not worthwhile or don't bring some benefit, or simply wandering about the flat wondering what to do next.  Generally, to be more active and efficient than previously.