It’s past midnight.
Officially I leave for France tomorrow, and a little philosophical musing is in order.
It’s weird (it was weird) to be back. I keep saying this but it is. All the houses look the same. Not the same as when I left, but the same as each other (except for the white ones w/heavy wooden beams tacked all over the front in some early 80’s approximation of a Barvarian villa). I mean every fourth house on my street is the same, and the fact that no one seems to go outside much makes it seem like a neighborhood of overgrown dollhouses with lawns so perfect and green they must be plastic. After living in Amiens, where seemingly everything is made of stone, the green roominess of suburbia seems fake, like we’re all characters in The Sims or the Truman Show. Not that I have anything against the suburbs.
So I did a little stream of consciousness while walking today, trying to remember/reconnect to the place where I’ve spent most of my life. To start off, who else remembers when Redmond Town Center was a golf course and T&D Feeds was around? Associated memory: Mom buying dog food while my sister and I ran to watch the chicks in the back under the heat lamps. And at the (old, no-longer-existent) Redmond Elementary when the wind would shift so the smell of wet barley/dog chow/whatever it was it smelled like vomit would wash over the playground and incite mass imitations of puking. Sometimes we’d get the smell of cows towards summer but education hill usually blocked it. Speaking of it, the hill’s always steeper than I remember it being. I used to walk up to Nike park with my grandmommy when she’d visit, back when my known world was infinitesimally small, limited to what I could reach on foot (kind of like it is now in France) and how I had these elaborate systems of remembering where places were. The park came after the pink tree (mimosa) and the stretch of sidewalk that some dog mistook for the Hollywood Walk of Fame and walked through the pavement when it was wet. Unfortunately they cut the tree down, and repaved.
It’s only a short stretch between the new (because the old one that I went to got torn down, of course,) junior high to the intersection and the road up to the high school, and maybe I’m paranoid, but it seemed like cars were slowing down as they passed by me, that some drivers were staring. (Obligatory comparison to France: If you don’t drive everywhere in Redmond but instead opt to walk people either assume your car broke or you’re poor or something, while if you dress up in spandex and prance down the street at an ungodly hour of the morning it’s viewed as normal. Whereas in France prancing is highly discouraged. They walk places, too.)
As I passed by the road up to high school, the pleasant “funny, I’m a stranger myself here” feeling continued to ebb as people continued to slow down imperceptibly to see who I was and if they knew me and I started to remember the flip side of home, the reason you can never truly return if you’ve truly been gone, i.e. that even though the place you call home may change, in your absence you change even more. And just as you expect that home is somehow sacred and will somehow remain constant, home expects you to sink right back into the space, the role you left behind, to sink right back into who you used to be.
The high school is (surprise) new but the pool next to it is the same one I used to beg to go swimming at each summer. Pool, summer, sherbert-striped ice cream trucks and the far-off roar of hot air balloons rising… the sound that would empty all the houses on this street as we’d count the balloons, sometimes 5 or even 6, hanging like inverted tear drops over the stinking cows and their stinking fields. So what is it here I’m longing for, exactly? Is home a physical place or only in the mind, found in the presence of friends and family or in vague childhood memories?
Sorry this post is long and rambling. Bear in mind Proust covered the same subject in a mere 4,000 pages in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, “in search of lost time” or “the remembrance of things past.” Or 8.9 pounds of nostalgic harkening-backs to childhood. Frankly, you lucked out.
And frankly, I’d better start packing.
...still feeling Proustian?
2 comments:
thats how i feel about hattiesburg. its all different now. its like i was never there because the things i remember are all wrong.
safe travels by the way.
I know that feeling all to well. When I am at home and feeling antsy. I would travel into town, walking. People also look at me oddly. Several times I have people stop to give me rides. Not having anywhere I wanted to go I would turn them down. There is so much that is no longer the way I remember it. So many places where I no longer fit in. Its a question for the philosopher's why these changes occurs. Although being scientists shouldn't we be able to make sense of these changes.
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