"I think the place you grew up in is a lot like 'Hotel California'; you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. We'll never know any place better than the place we grew up, and no place, I suspect, will ever be more important to us, at least in terms of our imaginative lives. For that reason there's something tragic in the understanding that many kids from small towns have -- that in order to be a success in life, they'll have to leave; to remain behind would be an admission of failure. For many, it means leaving their heart's home. Then again, there's a long American tradition embodied in the novels of Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis and others, which suggests that leaving a small town may be about the best thing that can happen to any young person" -- Richard Russo

My sister sent me that quote she had come across. We talk about our childhoods and the place that we left to become adults. When our father passed away in 2001, just a little over a year after the death of our mother, my sisters and I made the decision to give our parents' home, which had seen better days, to the neighbor on the condition that he tear the structure down. He kept his end of the bargain, and there is a nice vacant lot where home used to be at 312 3rd Street in Manning, Iowa. The trees that I planted there after the birth of my daughters remain, as well as the area in the back of the lot that is next to a pasture where we made forts. The rest lives on in my mind, which is how it should be.

Going home to Manning is usually done to decorate graves.

The concept of home is a moving target for many of us. The days of people staying in the same house their entire lives are passing, and many people will call several places "home" during their lifetimes.

For my family, Le Mars will soon surpass Hornick as the place we have called home the longest. This past weekend, we visited our oldest daughter and her husband in Minnetonka, Minn. They are expecting their first child within the next month, and are "nesting" in their apartment. At the same time, we attended freshman orientation for students and parents at the University of Minnesota, where our youngest will be a member of the Class of 2012, moving to her new home -- a dorm room -- in just a little over a month.

It's a strange thing to become the "older" generation and to have your home become the place where your children and grandchildren "come home" to. It's also quite surreal to see your children going through milestones of their adult lives that we have already done. It's a difficult thing to relate to your children in words, it's simply a case of just letting them go through the experience, and being there to discuss it if they want to do so.

My wife and I identified a broken steel belt in one of the tires in our daughter's car this weekend by riding in the back seat. I feel sometimes like Mike Myers' minor Saturday Night Live character, "Middle Age Man." The character was a "super hero," the alter ego of Ed Miles, who "possessed powers and knowledge far beyond younger men," (according to his theme song), offering his "hard earned" wisdom on car and household maintenance and financial matters such as mortgages to the younger generation. His catchphrase (all SNL characters need a catch phrase) was "Are you looking at my gut? I'm working on it!"