It puzzles me, whenever I return home from visiting the suburb of Cleveland where I grew up that I feel somehow disappointed. I’m not by nature an ungrateful person. I try to find the good in any experience and ignore the rest, but I’m nagged by the feeling that I missed something. I visit my brother, nephew, old friends and fondly remembered places. Last September, I attended my fifty-first high-school reunion and had good talks with people I haven’t seen in half a century. But something eluded me. Why is it not enough? Henry Taylor’s poem “Harvest” helps:
“Every year
in late July I come back to where I was raised,
to mosey and
browse through old farm buildings,
over fields
that seem never to change,
“rummaging
through a life I can no longer lead
and still
cannot leave behind, looking for relics
that might
spring back to that life at my touch.”
Time and place have fused. Cleveland for me is 1959 or thereabouts, though the persistence of memory is not a willful act of nostalgia -- always an indulgence I resist. I haven’t lived there since 1977 and have no longing to live there again. I'm not trying to recapture some mythical vision of youth.
Taylor’s
past is rural; mine, urban/suburban. Both are seductive. We were living at a
good time in a good place and didn’t know it. Inevitably, much has changed. Returning
is like those moments in dreams when we see someone we knew long ago but the shape
of their face is suddenly octagonal or they’re speaking Polish – slight, disturbing
alterations. As Taylor, who turned eighty this year, puts it, “time marches in a double column, double time.”
[Find
“Harvest” in Taylor’s This Tilted World
Is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, 1962–2020
(Louisiana State University Press, 2020).]
3 comments:
Two adjacent posts on places I know well: Cleveland and the Brooklyn Bridge (and Fort Greene!). I grew up in Cleveland and left in a cloud of dust at age and 19. Lived in NYC (Manhattan and Brooklyn) for 20 years, then moved back to Cleveland to enjoy a better quality of life.
40 years ago, it was possible to enjoy the Brooklyn Bridge in solitude any day of the week. On my most recent trip back to NYC, I found that the Bridge is now a tourist attraction, jammed with noisy, elbowing people even on early Sunday morning.
Cleveland, I've seen and been told, changes less or more slowly than other places. I continue to enjoy its general and peculiar pleasures as much today as ever.
Today I walked down the street I use to wander
Yeah, scratched my head and lit my cigarette
Well, there was all these things that I don't think I remember
Hey, how lucky can one man get?
- John Prine
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
Post a Comment