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Recently on Facebook, I reconnected with a dear friend from my youth who reminded me of the laughs we shared in an afterschool job and how nice it would be to revisit that time in our lives. I think we’ve all felt that bittersweet nostalgia and it was never portrayed better than in the Twilight Zone episode, “Walking Distance”.  Written by the master storyteller Rod Serling and starring Gig Young, it was #5 in the series and first aired in October 1959.

Critics have said that it was the most personal story Serling ever wrote, and easily the most sensitive dramatic fantasy in the history of television. The yearning to recapture one’s youth is an inescapable part of the  human condition, and to discover, in the end, that the past is irrevocably behind you can be heartbreaking and sobering. “Walking Distance” is still my favorite episode, even though it tears my heart apart each time I watch it.

(From Serling’s closing narration)

“Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there’ll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he’ll look up from what he’s doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there’ll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he’ll smile then too because he’ll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.”

 And now, submitted for your approval…

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“You can’t go home again” is the title of a book by Thomas Wolfe. The theme is that, however unfair, time passes, things change, and life is a one-way street.  Ironically, it was published posthumously in 1940.