I’ll try to be as concise as I can, but I’m making no promises…

Whenever I return to my home town to visit my mother or friends, or just to get a much-needed change of scenery, I invariably take a stroll around the “old neighborhood”, which never fails to put me in a wistful mood. The well-worn adage “you can’t go home again” is not entirely correct. You can go home again, you just must accept the feelings of alienation when you do.

The memories rise, crest, lap on the shores of consciousness, and recede back into the murk. “So-and-so used to live there”, or “that’s where I used to cut through to go to the ‘forbidden’ lake”, or “here’s the hill where we used to race our bikes”, or “that’s where C.R. threw a rock at my brother’s head”, and so forth. Their succession is manageable, almost leisurely, due to my mode of travel. If I was in a car I’m sure the effect would be completely different.

Back when I was a kid it seemed the sun was overpowering most of the time. Maybe it was because all the young trees around the block were too spindly to afford any shade. Certainly all the photo albums from the period had a bleached-out look. A lot of the contemporary movies have an over-exposed feel as well, come to think of it.

The neighborhood now looks better than it ever has, especially when it is in the throes of spring or under mounds of crusty snow. After 35 years the landscaping is now mature, and people have altered and improved their properties enough to introduce some much-needed character into the housing stock. A lot of the plain-Jane “3-tab” roof shingles  have now been replaced with superior products, and those awful railroad ties that everyone used to edge their flowerbeds with are now gone, too. But that’s all cosmetic. It’s disconcerting to look at all the different houses and realize that almost all of the families that resided there when you were young are long gone. 

I was reared in one of those iconic early-70’s developments, all split-levels and ranches, with a homeowner’s association that sponsored block parties and printed its own directory, where a host of classic two-parent nuclear families made their last stand before being torn apart by changing times and declining social mores. Most of the adults were about the same age. Most of the wives didn’t “work”. Most of the men hopped on the highway, commuted to their office jobs in downtown Cleveland , and returned home grumpy between 5:30 and 6:30 pm.

It must have been a simple matter to establish a spirit of community back then because everyone was in the same boat. But that fell apart a long time ago. One by one the original families moved out. People moved up the socioeconomic ladder and traded up to a bigger house with an additional bathroom and bedroom, sometimes breadwinners were transferred to other locales, couples split up and divorced, kids grew up and went off to college and never returned (unlike nowadays, where they do return and live at home for another 3 – 4 years). The next generation was composed of inhabitants who kept to themselves, and were not inclined to contribute and participate. And now a lot of the newcomers don’t even speak English. Maybe people really are more busy now, pulled in different directions. Maybe they’re scared. Maybe they’re selfish a-holes.

The town has changed radically since my departure. There’s a new library, town hall, police station and middle school, two additional fire stations and several superfluous shopping centers.  There’s a state-of-the-art rec center now (something we never had growing up). The high school now sports several new additions, an artificial turf football field and the “home” and “away” sides of the stands have been switched, which is much more disorienting than you would expect (especially if you were in marching band).    The traffic in the center of town is unrelenting and horrible.

There used to be a crazy guy (whose name I can’t recall at the moment) who shuffled around town. He had this odd lurching gait, would often gesticulate wildly and talk to himself. In a way he was our urban legend, a figure of fear, pity and morbid fascination all rolled into one. He was a couple years older than my older brother, which made him eight or nine years older than me. The story was that he was once a “straight-A” student, and during his senior year of high school, he attended a party where someone spiked his beverage (as a joke, ha-ha) with some frightful sort of acid and it totally messed up his mind. Now burdened with a fried brain, he wandered the city in an apparently aimless fashion.  He was like a revenant from the drug-addled 70’s, a cautionary tale come to life, our very own boogeyman.