I’m in a bad habit of bashing my hometown, especially online. Before income inequality became a thing most people acknowledged, I felt it acutely during Junior High, where my friends and I were very poor, but going to the junior high where most of the rich kids went. We called it prep school, even though it wasn’t, and we really hated the preps.
(Remember the lunch lady that was fired for paying for needy student's lunch? That didn’t happen at my school, but at the school that we had the largest rivalry with, and the school that I wanted to transfer to because it had fewer preps.)
To be fair, when I was less than a year old my very young parents bought a house in a “sprawl” area, and it was a largely homogeneous neighborhood right out of Leave it to Beaver, so I had a pretty beautiful childhood up until the age of nine when we moved. But the memories from ages nine to sixteen are the ones that stick with me, and for that reason I’ve always hated my hometown.
More on that but first, a word from our sponsors:
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One thing I will say about my hometown, though, is that while it’s an incredibly boring place to be as a teenager, it is a quite interesting place (and I must acknowledge that the town is doing what it can to become more liveable).
For one thing, it is a railroad town and for that reason we got a lot of transients, train-hoppers, and others in the downtown region. It’s also a college town, so it has that going for it. While there are a lot of pretty spots around and inside of it, the most iconic view of it in my opinion and memory is this, the infamous Center Street underpass:
As you can see, the street runs under the tracks (there are two other overpasses in town, where the road goes over it) and there are tunnels on either side of the underpass for pedestrians. My obvious caveat is that I haven’t walked through those tunnels in over twenty years, but I only remember the smell of piss, pot, and liquor, and never, ever walked through them alone.
(Another thing I’m in a bad habit of is taking way too long to get to my point…. So we’ll segue here.)
Because of the dominating railroad presence in town, and because of the college (and, honestly, two pretty good hospitals), a lot of strange people occupied our town. Some of them weren’t even really strange by our normal understanding of the term; they were more…. well, characters.
When I think of my hometown I don’t think of the actual town so much as the people who occupied it while I was there. Many of these people I found to be oppressive- the Mormon Church was a heavy presence in our lives, even after we’d left the church. And I’ll never forget the Principal and vice Principals (we had two) at my not-prep prep school who seemed to fetishize making an example of me. (Although I have to give props to the principal who, after being asked by a teacher to look at the stuff I was writing in Literature pulled me aside to tell me I had a gift and softened his stance considerably after getting his hands on some of my poems and essays. He, as far as I can tell, did not send a memo to his VPs.)
But there were other people…..
There was a man who dressed only in big, black garbage bags, head to toe. He only left holes for his eyes to see out of them, and when one broke he didn’t replace it, he simply it covered it with another garbage bag. He spent his days just walking around town; he defecated and urinated in his wardrobe so everyone crossed the street when they saw him coming. As you might expect, he would end up in the ER a few times a year with heat stroke. But after a week-long absence, he’d be back, wandering the streets, until one day he wasn’t.
Or the woman who ran. It’s not unusual in any town or city to see someone jog or run through the streets, but this woman ran. Not as training, not as exercise. You could see the terror in her eyes- she spent all day literally running from something. If you started running errands at 8am on a Sunday, you’d see her on the North side of town, running. If you stopped for lunch on the South side of town, you’d see her running. If you went to visit a friend in the afternoon on the West side of town, you’d see her running. She simply ran laps around town, all day long. For days on end.
There was The Leprechaun, a man of incredibly small stature who wandered around downtown in (wait for it) a leprechaun outfit singing songs to the malcontents wherever they were gathered. He’d ask for a beer in return and while most residents of the town (by which I mean the types who were downtown on any given night) were reluctant to give up ANY beer, they always did for The Leprechaun. Many of us simply handed him a beer as he walked by. My BFF and I used to have to spend a couple of hours just to score a six pack on a Friday night (anyone remember Zima?), yet after devoting all of our time to that cause, we’d willing give half of it to the leprechaun.
There were a few other characters in that town that I think of time to time. There were two kids who were twins and both had Down’s Syndrome. They’d stand on the busiest road a few blocks from each other making similar gestures or faces to people who drove by. We locals knew they were twins, but people not familiar with the situation had a “what the?! How the?!” reaction. I saw more than a few cars flip a U turn to confirm that these were, indeed, two separate men playing the same joke.
My grandma spent her entire adult life in that town working as a nurse in one of the hospitals. She spent many years working in the ER before preparing for retirement and going to work as a nurse for a doctor within the hospital but in private practice. Whenever I was with her and we saw these characters, she told me the backstory on them. All of them sound believable (and I do know that she worked a great deal with the twins) but I don’t know how much weight I can give to them.
She was really into messaging and trying to give us concrete examples of how life can go wrong if you don’t follow the right path. Now, I love my grandma more than life itself and I miss her every day, but she wasn’t exactly an unbiased source on things that can harm her grandchildren. (For example, she once saw me leaning back in a dining room chair with the back against the wall and the front legs up in the air. She told me I ought not to do that because she had an aunt who did that and the back legs snapped, dropping the seat against the floor, and it killed her beloved aunt. My grandma was, among other things, a genealogist and she literally wrote two books on our family history. No such aunt existed.)
So I don’t really know the backstory on any of these folks. I can somewhat sort truth from fiction in what my grandma told me, but at this point, why? I’m not left with impressions of bad decisions gone wrong or anything of the nature, and the reasons, often, seem unimportant to me.
What I remember most about these characters is that they lived. They had a story to tell, probably an important one, but we’ll never know what it was. We do know, however, that life is fragile, and the human spirit is breakable, and sometimes thing happen to us that we can’t undo and can’t run from, but that haunt us every day. How we deal with that is a remarkably individual thing.
How we react to that as observers says a lot about who we are.
I still don’t know why these people have stayed with me for so long and I can’t give an honest assessment on how I reacted to it, or if it informs how I react today.
I do know it had an effect on me and how I viewed the world at a very young age. It’s just that, if you ask me to explain that effect in less than several thousand words, I’d be at a loss.
And now, on to tops!
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Highlighted by Albanius:
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Highlighted by Margaret POA:
For Saturday, August 27, 2016, first comments and tip jars excluded. Thank you mik for the mojo magic! For those of you interested in How Top Mojo Works, please see his diary on the subject.
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