My three-year nostalgia tour has perhaps become more of a Nostalgia Destruction Tour with occasional highlights. I think I could manage it better with another try, especially the last year.
After finding a restaurant halfway up 128 to take one of my sons out to dinner at, I thought it might be fun to go through Westford and Concord to Sudbury on the way to Natick, as the first three were places on our 6AM Christmas morning trips when the boys were very small: My Dad and his second wife lived in Westford, my Mum and her second husband in Sudbury, then eventually on to my wife's family in Scituate before going home again late that night. A full day. Doing them all in one day became impossible when my mother and Ken retired to Wolfeboro.
Westford was odd because my grandfather's farm is on what is now a private road (Do Not Enter.) Fortunately someone was exiting and I waved him down and identified myself. I knew two of his brothers and also his father Donny Greenwood, who was from two towns over in Nova Scotia from my grandfather. I was allowed to pass through. I took pictures and talked to a neighbor, who I didn't remember. I mentioned that a family named Morse had owned the place. He nodded that they had bought the place from Morse fifty years ago. He remembered my grandparents and the chicken coop and the sand pit, but things went south a bit when I mentioned that Gramma Helen was a difficult person. He looked genuinely offended. "Oh no, she was a wonderful person." Well, fine. She was the original cat lady plus a dog that bit, as in Thurber. Mildly crazy in important ways. But if she had been a good neighbor, then that's to her credit. Though it was looking like time to skedaddle.
Heading south, I tried to cut back to Carlisle but also include the site of the original Dropkick Murphy's Sanitarium on my way but couldn't make it work, even slowing down and looking at the fields. I lost more time and the rains started in, but I finally got back on my way just above Middlesex School, one of the St Grottlesex schools, and there was suddenly lots of traffic going into Concord. So I'm late. I'm not recognising much along the way, which surprised me. More on that at the end. Things went slowly all the way through Concord and down into North Sudbury, and still, I am only recognising very occasional landmarks. (This route puts you on the other side of the overrated Walden Pond of overrated HD Thoreau fame, which is fine by me.) By the time I made it to my old house, built by my parents in 1971 (across from a mink farm that smelled terrible but was on its way out) I was already overdue in Natick and not liking anything I was seeing. I took pictures and hoped no one saw me, whereas earlier in the day I had thought it might be nice to talk to the current residents.
I recognised one other house, nest door. I went a few blocks over to an old GF's house and was mildly gratified that I at least recognised it on first try, but it was still raining and I got out of there after a very few moments as well. Goodnight House. I was now navigating through roads I had seldom traveled, in traffic and by memory. I was increasingly trying to contain my irritation. But I did already have the beginnings of the idea that it is only people I am nostalgic about, not places. Because I place my memories of people in a location I associate with them, such as an office or a house I had misled myself into thinking I cared about places. I don't. I don't like Westford very much and I don't like Concord very much and I don't like Sudbury very much. Whatever I have been trying to find on my visits every second decade I now see is never going to be there.
Bright sun and rain were alternating so I'm switching sunglasses off and on and really worried I am going to be lost any moment now, when I came around a corner and saw a double rainbow. I am not a fan of rainbows, but I am a fan of Double Rainbow Guy and I knew God was telling me to just calm down, chuckling at me. What does this mean? What does this mean indeed. It means I have been a fool again, though mostly harmless. It is good not to take myself too seriously.
Children, what have we learned today?
8 comments:
I shall try to learn from your example. After Dad died, Mom moved out West to be with my sister and to be a grandmother to her newborn. I stayed long enough to help her move, clean out the house, and get it sold. I haven't been back to the place I was raised in years now, and I don't know if I ever will return. There's nothing there for me now; the only reason even to go would be to visit Dad's grave.
My experience would doubtless be similar to yours, and perhaps it's best I just go other places instead. There is still a lot I haven't seen.
Returning to places you were young and happy is profoundly disappointing because you are no longer young and happy. At least that's the way with me. Also the place has changed and all I see is the absence of the people I loved. That's why it is best to return to such place only in memory. Place is not a geographic location. It is an intersubjective relationship between a person and a geographic location. When you return to a location, you feel the absence of that intersubjective relationship.
I drove out of town for a walk in the country last week. I left town on a highway I used to drive with all out children chattering and laughing in the minivan. I drove the same highway to visit my son when he was in college. Because I keep layering new memories on that highway, driving it is not too painful. But there is still pain.
"Heading south, I tried to cut back to Carlisle but also include the site of the original Dropkick Murphy's Sanitarium on my way but couldn't make it work, even slowing down and looking at the fields."
One of the cool things about my new car is it will drive its self. So you can let it do that, holding on to the wheel as it is not a Tesla, and you can look at everything beside the road, about as well as if you were a passenger.
Every car is self-driving if you don’t care where you end up.
No that's a car that cannot drive its self, it will crash. My Solterra will just stop if it is confused enough.
When I visited Liberia, it was driven home: places are not yours. They pass on to others, who reshape them for their own purposes and make their own memories that have nothing to do with you. Even when you keep the place, as we have with the current house, it changes. The trees the kids used to play on died long ago, and much else wore out also.
My old neighborhoods are a 2200 mile drive away. I saw them in the rearview mirror on our way east to the "wilds" of WNC, to the little town of Cullowhee, NC, home to Western Carolina University. Talk about culture shock after having been born and raised in San Diego CA until the age of 16. We left in the summer of 1975.
The closest return to my old bailiwick was a few years ago when I had a temporary job in Walnut Creek just east of San Francisco, remodeling a CVS pharmacy.
I revisit me old neighborhoods vis Google Earth and use the street view to see if anything is still the same. Our old house that we got eminent domain out of for the 805 freeway is still there. The Little League field complex, a ten minute walk away, is no longer there, having been usurped for a childhood care headstart center and the building across the street from the baseball field that had a 7-11 store at one end and a bar, the Gateway Lounge at the other, is now a boarded up Mexican restaurant. (The owner of the bar was one of our neighbors on the cul de sac and his oldest daughter was my first girlfriend when I was six.)
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