Home: Where everything is different, yet everything is the same

HAMPSTEAD, Md. – It was early, and cold, no less than a 30-degree drop from the balmy and humid southern hemisphere in which I had just spent the previous week, competing in a beach volleyball tournament in Brazil, a concept as foreign to my hometown as English is to Portuguese.

So I didn’t exactly plan to stick my head out the window into that frosty, wind-chilled air for long, ordering coffee at the Dunkin drive through, but when I did, a familiar voice yelled out.

“Tram?” Bryan Johnson called, incredulously, from the car behind me, referencing the childhood nickname bestowed upon me sometime in elementary school.

Nowhere else in the world is that name used than Hampstead.

Nowhere else in the world could a drive-thru become a reunion between childhood friends.

I was home.

***

Home is at once the same as it has ever been, yet it has never been more different.

When my friends in California, or anyone who is piqued by the notion that a guy from a bucolic town in Maryland is now playing and writing about beach volleyball for a living, ask me where I was raised, the answer is always the same: The Greatest Place on Earth. I call Hampstead a generational town, and though I have no numbers or statistics to back this up, I’m fairly confident in my description that few leave this town – because it’s the Greatest Place on Earth – and even fewer move into it, because nobody has ever heard of it.  

Little happens in Hampstead. It’s a town of roughly 6,400 that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, has grown in population by a whopping 78 individuals – in the last decade. Arguably the biggest change I’ve seen at home was the rebranding of Dunkin Donuts in which it became, simply, Dunkin.

Other than that? The two main restaurants that were the bastions of my childhood – Greenmount Station and J&P Pizza – are still the only two places you’re going to grab a drink or bite when you don’t feel like cooking. Mrs. Janis and Mr. Donald Wheatley still drop by on their way to or back from wherever it is they were headed. No traffic lights have been added, though I’ll admit there has been the addition of a single stop sign. Doors remain unlocked, open to friends and friends of friends. You cannot drop in a restaurant or grocery store or hit the gym without running into someone you know, or knew from another life.

And it was, indeed, J&P, where Bryan and our good friend, David Birnie, grabbed happy hour drinks for an hour, catching up, talking life. The dichotomy between my California life and the life I left back home, the lives being lived by all of my childhood friends and brothers, was made sharp as a pinprick.

Delaney and I, who for the past two-plus years have made a living playing, coaching, writing and podcasting about beach volleyball, are as relatable as aliens.

We hardly talked about ourselves during that hour in J&P, but the little humans in which Bryan and Dave are now charged with raising through this world. Bryan’s the father of a two-and-a-half-year-old budding golfer named Hayden, with another – also a boy – on the way. I say two-and-a-half because, being around so many new parents, I realized the monumental difference six months is in the life of a toddler, whereas six months in the life of an adult will note hardly any more changes than six minutes. Dave’s the father of a 2-year-old with silky golden hair named Caroline. The kids are great friends, daycare buddies.

So, for an hour, we talked almost exclusively of parenthood: day care and sleep schedules, occasional temper tantrums, and the constant winging it that is fatherhood – how, for example, do you get your kids to stop biting other kids?

There were times when I laughed, many times out loud, at the sharp divide in life, and conversation, between Hampstead and Hermosa Beach.  

In California, for the vast majority of my peers, our discussions revolve almost exclusively around beach volleyball, and on the life or death matter that is qualifying, or making a Sunday, or the latest partner gossip.

Yes, Tri Bourne, a great friend and podcast partner, is a wonderful father, and I have loved watching him navigate this new season with his daughter, Naia, and wife, Gabby. Riley McKibbin, too, is a doting dad to little Storm.

But they are the vast exceptions in my Southern California community.

Because I am married, and have an apartment with an – can you believe it? – extra room, with a driveway, I am considered as a real, live adult in a world of Peter Pans.

In Hampstead, I am very much a 31-year-old Peter Pan, living for the next beach, the next game, the next adventure.

Most of us in Southern California are making every effort we can to stave off traditional lifestyles, where there are jobs that care where and when and how often we show up, that demand we take off – take off? – to travel around the world to play a game.

Returning to Hampstead is reminiscent of how I felt as a college student visiting home to a world full of adults. It’s a wonderful reality check, going home, helping me to chuckle at how seriously I sometimes take myself in beach volleyball – beach volleyball, for Christ’s sake. Meanwhile, my best friends in the world are navigating what I am coming to view as what must be the most terrifying phase of life: Parenthood. Losing a match pales in comparison to, say, one of your kids going to the hospital with a respiratory condition, which happened to one of my buddies last Friday morning.

What is having a fitful night of sleep prior to a qualifier when compared with your daughter screaming, for no evident reason, with no evident solution, from 10 p.m. to 4:30 a.m., as my niece has done to my poor brother quite frequently of late. Apparently, that’s what kids do at the 4-6-month age, of which my niece, Ryleigh, is directly in the midst.

In Hampstead, we talk sleep schedules and the phases of children. In California, we talk tournament schedules. We wonder whose couch we can crash on, what loose change we can scrape up to pay for this flight or that AirBNB.

In Hampstead, we’re talking breastfeeding or bottle, how you show more in your second pregnancy than your first, how your daughter has become obsessed with donuts and the donut onesie she loves to wear. 

The conversations change, as does the fun.

Friday evening marked a seminal moment of the fall season in Hampstead: The Christmas lighting ceremony at the local park. It’s a fun evening, in which kids of all ages act in live nativity scenes, sing Christmas carols, put on concerts through which loving parents, sharing laughter together during the event, must tell their children afterwards how great they were, in spite of them all being objectively awful singers. I know, because I once played the saxophone in this very concert, and my mother assured me I could have a jazz career that would rival that of Miles Davis.  

Seeing my friends do exactly that was hysterical.

Was it really that long ago that we were the kids?

Every time I come home, which is not often enough, I am asked no less than a dozen times when I am coming home for good. Never had I felt more pangs to do so than on Friday night, after seeing the same community that raised me now rearing the next generation. It’s a community so rare I don’t feel so bold to say that I don’t think there’s another like it in the world.

Hampstead is virtually one giant hacienda. As kids, we were raised by a village. Rare was the occasion that any of our parents locked our houses, leaving them open for any of us to just wander in, unannounced, and begin raiding the fridges and pantries. It was more regular than not over the summers for my parents – or the parents of any of my 10 closest friends – to head off to bed with just three boys sleeping under the roof only to wake up with half a dozen sprawled on the couches and floors and, on one memorable occasion, the stairs.

It’s funny, because that is exactly how my California life is at the moment. We’re all big kids, and we know it, and love it. We love the freedom that comes with being big kids, of having few responsibilities and even fewer people to whom we are accountable. It’s a community in many ways that isn’t all that different from Hampstead – we’re just still the children. We crash on each other’s floors and couches and, if any of us had the financial blessing to have an apartment that included stairs, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few wind up there. The importance of winning a beach volleyball match is reminiscent of the life-or-death value I once placed on a high school golf match.  

It’s both silly and not. Beach volleyball, wild as it still sounds, has been the exclusive source of my income – either writing about it, podcasting about it, playing it, or coaching it – for the past three years. And while the idea of returning to the homestead sounds idyllic, any notion of actually putting such a move into motion was washed away by the Pacific Ocean on Sunday morning, when I woke up to meet Tri to surf before church.

You can’t surf in Hampstead.

Nor would I be able to wake up this morning, a Monday, while the rest of the adults in this world have to report to someone or something, and I have an empty calendar, save for a 4 p.m. slot in which I will meet with Tri and Savvy Simo to talk about – what else? – beach volleyball.

All of me wants both of these worlds: the freedom and beauty and adventure of Southern California, the inimitable community of Hampstead. I don’t know if it’s too much to ask for both.

Lord knows I’m sure going to try.