Hometown

You can't ever change your hometown, can you? Mine has seemed a great static force in my life. Always existent, always a reference point. I leave and come back a different person, but it's always the same. Stores go up and come down, paving is replaced, the town green goes through its seasons, college students enter and exit, but this place is still the same persistent snapshot in my memory.
I drove into town to pick up a pizza the other day, and was suddenly conscious of myself in the third person, driving my mother's car, feeling the town's knowledge of who I am peer through the window and re-estimate me--the Smith boy, the MUHS grad, my sister's brother. But that isn't the self that I know, that I feel, setting the brake and jogging into the restaurant. I am learning to be discontent with them. I never thought I would be.