Some roads take you away from home. Others make you understand what home has become.
Follow the Build / Life / August 2026
The alarm blasted at 6:05 in the morning.
I laid there for a few minutes trying to come to terms with the fact that the day had arrived. I had stayed up until roughly 3:45 in the morning working on what eventually became my new personal website, trying to get it ready for whenever Raymond announces my inclusion in the current touring lineup of PIG.
So this already sad, bittersweet day was going to be wrapped in a layer of exhaustion and some entirely self-imposed sleep deprivation.
The clock is ticking before the tour starts, and lately I’ve been trying to squeeze every ounce of available “eyeballs open” time out of every day.
The day before, my family had our last hurrah at Coney Island.
It’s something we typically do on the last weekend before school starts, but this year the calendar doesn’t cooperate. My daughter will be starting college around the same time I hit the road, so this was effectively it. The last time the four of us would be together for this particular annual ritual.
We rode the rides. We didn’t stay particularly late. We managed to get home by around 10:00.
I should have gone to sleep.
I did not.
By morning, despite all of this, we managed to get on the road with a respectable amount of “not as tardy as we usually are” time. Our projected arrival was only about twelve to fifteen minutes late.
This is a victory in my family.
I routinely lie to myself and everyone else about what time we actually need to leave. The lying-to-myself trick works pretty well when I’m alone. Trying to wrangle three other human beings into the same imaginary schedule usually produces the undesired effect of us being chronically late to basically everything.
The drive itself was familiar.
Up the New Jersey Turnpike, toward the New York State Thruway, heading for Middletown.
And then Harriman.
Something happens to me around the Harriman exit.
It always has.
It’s where urban New York starts giving way to something else. I spent a considerable amount of my childhood straddling those two worlds, living in both the Bronx and Middletown, New York. Somewhere around Harriman, the landscape starts waking up memories before I consciously ask for them.
Then comes 17M.
As a child, that meant we were almost home.
And I hated going home.
It took me until this particular drive to really put that into words.
I don’t mean that my childhood home was some relentlessly horrible place. It wasn’t. Our apartment and our community weren’t all that great, but they weren’t all that bad either.
The problem was that wherever I had just been always seemed more exciting.
Something different had happened. Something fun. And now we were getting off that exit, heading down 17M, and I knew what came next.
Home.
The dopamine was over.
Back to the familiar. Back to the mundane. Back to whatever an ordinary day meant when I was a kid.
I remember that feeling.
What I didn’t realize until this drive was that I still have it.
I still hate going home.
Only now I hate it for a very different reason.
Over the last bunch of years, taking that exit and heading down 17M has increasingly meant that I’m coming home because something sad has happened.
This time it was my grandmother.
She lived on this planet for 105 years.
One hundred and five.
A wonderful woman. A flawed woman, because people are flawed. But also a woman who occupied a place in my life that went far beyond what the word “grandmother” usually describes.
When my mother was doing the things she needed to do to provide for her family, my grandmother was often immediately there. There was discipline. There was structure. There was a bond that I probably didn’t fully understand at the time.
There is a much larger history between my mother, her mother and me, and this isn’t the place where I want to tell all of it.
But I think it is fair to say this:
My grandmother saved my life when my life needed saving.
I was too young to save it myself.
And now I was going home to say goodbye to her.
Maybe that’s why the old feeling came back so strongly.
As a child, I hated going home because going home meant something wonderful had ended.
This time, I hated going home because something wonderful had ended.
The difference was that I wasn’t going to get another weekend.
There would be no next trip.
I knew what was waiting for me at the end of 17M. I was going to see this woman who had been there for so much of my life, give her a kiss, say thank you, and say goodbye for the last time.
There is still a part of me that enjoys going back to Middletown.
I see what used to be there.
I remember the places I walked with my grandmother. I remember the places I walked alone. Buildings become memories. Streets become people. An intersection can suddenly contain a version of yourself that hasn’t existed for forty years.
I love that feeling.
But lately it comes with a side order of dread.
Because increasingly, I’m not going home just to visit those memories.
I’m going home because another person who inhabited them is gone.
And maybe that’s the part of getting older nobody can adequately explain to you when you’re young.
The geography stays put.
Harriman is still Harriman.
17M is still 17M.
Middletown is still there.
You can drive the same roads and recognize the same turns. You can point to where something used to be. You can remember exactly how to get somewhere you haven’t needed to find in decades.
But eventually you realize that a hometown isn’t really made out of roads, buildings or exits.
It’s made out of people.
The night before this drive, I was at Coney Island with my daughter for the last one of our traditional pre-school trips before she starts college.
Soon I’m leaving too.
I’ll spend months traveling from city to city, living in hotels and vehicles and venues, waking up every day somewhere that isn’t home.
It’s strange to realize that the little boy who hated going home grew up trying to build a life that involves leaving it so often.
But this time, driving down 17M, I wasn’t thinking about leaving.
I was thinking about all the times I had traveled this exact road toward a home filled with people I assumed would always be there.
I hated going home as a child because I knew the adventure was over.
I never imagined there would come a day when I’d hate going home because home itself was disappearing.