Last week I paid a visit to Xenia, Ohio, the town where I went to high school. Following high school I went to college, got married, went to grad school, moved to Pennsylvania, and raised a family. I never lived in Xenia again, although my mother still lives there.

Some of you readers with a memory for major meteorological events may recall that Xenia is the little southwestern Ohio town that got largely blown away by a tornado back around 1974, long after I moved away. Since that happened, the entire face of the town has changed. It's been rebuilt, but many of the landmarks that comprise my memories of Xenia are no longer the same. At best, they're different. At worst, they're just gone. Most of the old schools, including my high school and junior high, were blown away. Most of the old churches, including the one whose choir I sang in, were blown away. Today, the downtown, the park, the teenage hangouts -- all are from some other town and some other time ... not mine, any more.

I like to visit my mother, but when I run errands for her I tend to wander around town with an eerie, twilight-zone feeling. The memories clash with the reality. I get disoriented. It's somebody else's town, now. I can go to visit, but I'm not going home.

It was in Xenia where, as a senior in high school, I joined SPEBSQSA thirty years ago this November. I remained a member of the Xenia chapter for a couple of years, but college pressures began to weigh heavily, and when I finally concluded that I had to assign priorities and cut something, I chose -- foolishly -- to cut barbershopping.

So 27 years of no barbershopping went by. That's ... let's see, 27 times 12 ... that's about 324 months. I'll bet that not one of those 324 months went by without my thinking about the joys of barbershopping at least once. I was dumb to quit. Dumb.

Last February, the 27-year stretch of non-barbershopping foolishness ended: I joined the Butler chapter, and all of that incredible fun and fellowship came pouring back down on me in a heartbeat. Almost more than I could stand, and I want to thank you guys again for every bit of it.

But even though I've visited Xenia many times over the years, it took till last week, at the end of a business trip to Dayton, to screw up the courage to go back to a meeting of the Xenia chapter of the Barbershoppers. Maybe I thought they'd be like the tornado-ravaged town: strange, unrecognizable, foreign.

I planned ahead. Took along a copy of the program from our 1959 show, with a picture of the chorus. And a list of names. Maybe just to prove to a roomful of strangers that I was home. The faces in the picture were certainly familiar to me, but so are my memories of the town that's not mine any more.

I've visited other chapters before without being nervous, but I was a little edgy when I walked into this meeting.

Wham. Time Warp. There was Chuck, one of the members of that bass section of 1958. Sounds EXACTLY the same. Smiles EXACTLY the same. There was Ron, still probably the most distinguished-looking baritone ever to ring a barbershop chord (yep, even more distinguished than our own Charlie Grabe). And there (even though he wasn't part of the chapter back in my Xenia) was Dick, the young physician who delivered our first-born child in 1963.

Five or six of us sang a few songs as the group assembled. Then they started the chorus rehearsal. Just like we/they did years ago. They're reading some new songs. They're also doing some of the same songs that we're doing here in Butler. Familiar stuff. I don't know if I sounded as good as I felt, but I felt as if I had come home.