The first pilgrimage, the Return, almost always involves the same two sacred sites: the childhood home, and the school. These two hallowed grounds marked our formative years when time seemed longer, because time was marked out by constant novelty, discovery and innovation. Things seem long when you're experiencing them for the first time, and childhood always seems long to us for that reason. Often on the Return pilgrimage, we will wonder how it was only two or three years that all those memories could have been crammed into, and also at just how much bigger things seemed in our childhood minds than they actually are upon the return. The walls were higher, the trees were bigger, the streets were longer, and the hills behind your house were mountains. It was a time when every day was an adventure, and time seemed to stretch out immeasurably to no end. In the span of a few years, great things happened, events that shaped the destiny of your life. The love, friendship, adventure, success, failure were all great, and regardless of whether they were remembered as happy times or sad, they were exciting times, and you felt things then. To return to these inanimate yet hallowed and vivid places always seemed to me a duty, as if it were repayment for great gifts bestowed once, and which deserve the paying of respects now. Because the house and the neighborhood and school were alive once, and they had souls, and we must respect their souls as we would a dead family member. Those souls were created only through us. That is the beauty of the Return pilgrimage. What was created between me and the hallowed place, was the soul. Neither on its own means anything. It is together that the spirit awakes, the soul manifests, and the experience becomes sublime. It is through that interaction of brain, eyes, light and brick that the walls come to life, that the buildings speak, that the windows reproduce faces that once peered through them and now peer back in our minds.
We will return, and we will stand silently, and observe. We will assume a solemn remembrance for the bonds of self and place and time. We will pick out the holiest of signs, the relics of the hagiography in our minds. The gate, the door, the bush, the tree, the steps, the window, the vines, the wall... We find ourselves in a temple, and everything has meaning, no matter how profane, no matter how inanimate, no matter how lowly, or how utilitarian. The world comes alive when we stand there, and our life regains its sense of wonder and mystery. It is deeply personal, it is shared with few if any others, and even then not in exactly the same way. There is merely overlapping. But in essence what you worship there is unique. It is yours. That is your place, that is your temple, and nobody can ever take that away from you.
The second kind of pilgrimage is the Seeking, because it's a not-yet-attained yearning for something, some place that held great meaning for us in our formative years, but which has eluded us until the pilgrimage of Seeking. In my case, the Seeking was center court at Wimbledon, because I grew up playing tennis and watching tennis, and it was for many years all I would do outside school. I would wake up at 6am and hit on the wall for hours before school, and then again after school. I would wake at 4am to watch Wimbledon on TV, and I would skip school if there was a match I had to see. I remember countless matches watched on TV, all in that sacrosanct cathedral to the thing I loved: tennis. To others, the pilgrimage may be to the Metropolitan Opera, maybe to Yankee Stadium, maybe to a Museum. To me, the thought of walking onto center court at Wimbledon would be the way a Catholic would feel upon walking into St. Peters Cathedral. It would be a truly religious experience, and I don't just mean that as a metaphor. The times I lay out on the floor watching the McEnroe's, the Becker's, the Edberg's, the Cash's, the Lendl's and the Connors's would come flooding back to me. The Duke and Duchess of York would be up there waving. John Newcombe or Tony Trabert would be commentating from the press box. The photographers lined along the side would be clicking. The faces in the crowd would be fanning themselves and clapping and running from the rain and returning with their umbrellas. Giants would be facing off on either side of the net, each of them surely ten feet tall and superhuman. The grass under my feet would be something not of this world. I would be stunned and in awe of the power of that place. And inside I would experience something truly akin to a religious ecstasy, or an epiphany.
But so far, that Seeking hasn't happened. I've yet to go to Wimbledon, but it's a pilgrimage I hope to achieve one day. As for the Return pilgrimage, that's a bit different. I've had a few childhood homes, and while I've done the Return pilgrimage to a couple, others I've yet to do. And sometimes when I have it within my grasp to do so, I chicken out. Something pulls me away. I feel a melancholy kind of fear, as if it would only bring back to me the memory of what is gone and can never be retrieved. As if I would only become conscious of a happy time lost, and feel all the more powerfully the onset of age and the cruel passing of time.
But I know I have to overcome this fear, because life is too long to live without going on that pilgrimage that will remind you just how short and just how precious it really is.
