Going Back to Buffalo

Going Back to Buffalo

This past weekend, I went back to New York.

I spent a couple of days in Watertown with my son, then made the drive west to Buffalo for the celebration of life service of my old little league coach, the father of one of my friends from high school. I have been back to Buffalo several times over the years, but this trip felt different for some reason. Maybe age changes the way you return home. Maybe life does.

As I drove into Western New York, something familiar started happening. Certain exits still triggered memories. Street names I had not thought about in years suddenly came rushing back into my mind like they had just been waiting there quietly all this time. Places that once felt enormous now seemed strangely small. Distances that used to feel far apart now looked like ten-minute drives.

It is strange what happens when you go back home after enough years have passed. You realize you are not only revisiting a place. You are revisiting former versions of yourself. The little boy riding his bike through the neighborhood. The teenager trying to figure out who he was. The young man leaving town convinced life was somewhere else. The husband, father, pastor, or exhausted leader. Now, the man rebuilding his life after divorce and recovering from a heart attack.

The Celebration of Life event was powerful in a quiet way. Nothing flashy. Just stories about a good man who showed up for people. As I stood there listening, I realized something I had never fully considered before. When I was a kid, men like him seemed permanent. Larger than life. Coaches, firefighters, fathers, men who worked hard, showed up, and became part of the structure of your world without you even noticing it at the time.

Then one day you are standing in a church gym realizing you are now around the same age they were back then. 

I thought about Sunday morning football games in the park. Little league dugouts. Working-class neighborhoods. Pizza shops. Conversations that seemed ordinary at the time but helped shape an entire generation of boys growing up in Cheektowaga.

Back then, none of us were thinking about legacy. We were just living life. But now, looking back, I can see how much those men mattered.

I also realized something else during this trip. Nostalgia is complicated. We tend to think going home will somehow make us feel young again. Sometimes it does for a moment. Then reality catches up. The people are older. Some are gone. The neighborhoods have changed. And honestly, so have we.

But maybe that is not a bad thing.

Maybe going home is not about trying to recover the past. Maybe it is about understanding it better.

As I flew back south, I kept thinking about how fast life moves. One minute you are the kid looking up to the older men in the room. The next minute you are becoming one of them.

And somewhere in between, if you are fortunate, you begin to understand that ordinary moments were never ordinary at all.