No, no, no, Newark, N.J., is not my hometown! I just happened to have been born there. (In St. Barnabas Hospital, in case you wondered. And no, it hasn’t anything to do with the sympathetic vampire on Dark Shadows.)

My hometown is Highland Lakes, N.J., or as I proudly rattled it off as a very little person, “Hiyakesnewjersey.” Within a month of my birth, I was living at what is now 107 Vista Road. (We didn’t get a street address until I was in high school. For years we were PO Box 491. Then we became RD#1 Box 366.)

Highland Lakes was a cool place to grow up. Five lakes—four of them manmade—seven beaches, ball courts, tennis courts, swimming and sailing galore. (There was also great fishing, but that activity bored me to tears.) It was up on Waywayanda Mountain, from the highest peak of which you can see into New York state to the north. I spent many hours up on that peak doing my homework with the dog. (She was very good at conjugating Spanish verbs and was a whiz at the periodic table of the elements.) In winter I’d ride my bike on the frozen lakes. It was my only opportunity to ride on a flat surface, as everything else was hills, many of them substantial.

I haven’t been home to Hiyakesnewjersey since Dad passed away in February 2007, but I’m hoping to go back and see friends there early this summer. Meanwhile, my brother recently notified me that Dad’s house was back on the market, and for considerably less than we sold it for to a couple named Jason and Kimberley. I’m sorry they have to sell. They seemed a very nice young couple.

We looked at pictures of all the work they’ve done to it since we moved out. Some changes I like, and some just ain’t right. Foremost among the latter is the loss of the “country cabin” style that made our house so homey. It used to have neat, rough-cut wooden siding. Making it warm and cozy inside was awesome knotty pine paneling. This was the real stuff, not masonite printed to look like knotty pine.

The new owners covered the house in beige vinyl siding and ripped out all the knotty pine inside and hung sheetrock in its place. They did some good stuff, though. There’s an awesome front deck that overlooks the lake, about half a mile away, and they replaced and enlarged the back deck.

(That’s where Dad was engrossed in his newspaper one sunny day when he heard someone clear his throat at the steps. Lowering his paper he found himself about six feet away from a friendly bear, who, with a bear’s limited visual acuity, hadn’t noticed Dad behind his newspaper. Dad shot into the house and the bear, just as surprised as Dad was, shot up a tree. From those vantage points they stared at each other through the kitchen window.)

The front deck used to just be a landing by the door. I recall sitting on my grandfather’s lap there on a drizzly spring day. I was bitterly disappointed that it was raining because Poppa and I were supposed to go for a walk and I was really looking forward to it. However, we passed a very pleasant period just sitting on the landing, sheltered by its roof, and chatting about all those wonderful things a boy discusses with his grandfather. Since then I’ve always enjoyed sitting on a porch and watching the rain.

The new folks knocked out the nice, big picture window to put in a suburban house’s sliding glass patio door, which I think just doesn’t fit. But they did some good stuff, too. Our old dining room, which had previously been an open porch when the house began life as an early 1950s summer cabin, was opened up and turned into the kitchen. The old kitchen, which was miniscule, was totally ripped out, as was Dad’s little office, which was originally the cabin bathroom. Those changes enlarged the living room nicely.

Jason and Kimberley also tore out the original cabin attics, extending the cathedral ceiling the length of the old original cabin. (Though for some odd reason they flattened it out instead of allowing it to go all the way up to the peak of the roof, as it used to.)

In the “new” section of the house, which dates from 1962, they reduced the size of the landing that leads to the original section of the house. That’s a shame, because it made a grand prescenium for the production of childhood plays. On the other hand, I see a photo of my bedroom, which has been converted to a sort of study. My closet is now a pair of bookshelves, which I think looks really sharp.

Kimberley told me one of her favorite features is a reproduction of an antique map of the world on the wall in the upstairs hallway. Dad hadn’t painted the hallway walls yet, and the unfinished plasterboard reminded me of antique parchment. I painted and drew the map on the wall over a succession of cold, winter nights in 1972. In fact, while I was working on it, President Nixon came on the TV downstairs and announced the signing of the Paris peace accords, ending our involvement in Vietnam. Kimberley told me that it was in front of the map that Jason proposed to her, knowing she liked it so much. She told me the only change they made was to mount a frame around it.

The garage now has a peaked roof. It used to have a sort of flat roof with a very slight peak to it. It was used as a sundeck and was the location for many wonderful picnics and lazy days in a hammock. Our pseudo-cousins, the Doaks, would come up from Pennsylvania and we’d have loads of fun driving pedal cars around that sundeck while our parents visited. They were the sort of relatives you’d have if you could pick your own relatives. I stay in regular touch with pseudo-cousin Allen, who is a swell guy and a great friend.

One wintery day after a nice, deep snowfall, a friend and I set up a folding lawn chaise lounge in the snow and my friend, wearing naught but his swimsuit, sprawled on it with a book, sunglasses and an iced tea while I took pictures. (I need to get hold of copies of those pix!) And it’s where Spooky, our half German shepherd, half Newfoundland mix would lounge on a summer’s day. (Our grandmother was convinced she would escape by jumping off the sundeck. Spooky was no idiot. She’d escape by going to the other end of the yard and jumping from a small hillock over the fence.)

It was fun looking through the slides on the realtor’s Web site, but it was also sad in some ways to see the home that holds so many memories looking so dramatically different. My brother and I agree that Mom would have a fit if she saw all that wonderful (and extremely valuable) knotty pine so callously ripped out. But she and Dad would’ve liked the idea of converting the dining room into the kitchen and opening it to the living room. We had plenty of plans to expand the kitchen, but had never thought of that option.

Someone said you can never go home but that’s not true. For many, such as myself, home is always in a warm place in my heart and I can visit it whenever I wish. In my mind I can still vividly see all those Christmasses and birthdays and graduation parties and Thanksgivings and snowball fights and sledding down the driveway and raking leaves and doing homework and family Monopoly nights. Looking at those photos on Weichert Realtors’ Web site brings them all rushing to the forefront.

Highland Lakes will always be my hometown.

I’m just glad Jason and Kimberley got rid of the avocado kitchen appliances and orangey-red carpet. What WAS Mom thinking?

(Want to see my childhood home as it looks today? Here’s the link to the realtor’s Web site: http://www.weichert.com/search/realestate/propertylisting.aspx?P=22773722)

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