Hometown and Back

I spent seven and a half hours on the road yesterday getting back to Vermont from Pennsylvania. If I wasn't so happy to be coming home, those long drives would be torturous. I've been making the trip with Ella since she was three months old and she continues to be my most favorite co-pilot. For a little kid who can't keep still long enough to finish a thought, she does remarkably well strapped in to her little booster seat for the long stretches between pee stops and coffee breaks. Now that she can read (and has been witness to more than one of my speeding tickets), she's become my constant commentator on the current speed limit. Except she reads it like she's an airline attendant or a Verizon computerized operator.

"The speed limit is now 55."

"The speed limit is now 35"

"Reduced speed ahead."

We went to Pennsylvania to visit my folks but mostly to visit my uncle Bobby who was in from El Paso. He's kind of a retired bad-ass mother fucker who now has a pace maker and defibulator in his heart. He's been military most of his adult life and so we haven't spent a great deal of our lives in the same place. When he retired though, in 1991, he moved back to Pennsylvania and stayed for just a few years. Those few years happened to be some of my most difficult. I was just fresh out of high school and trying to carve my own way but I had a bunch of baggage that I was trying to drag behind me and couldn't seem to summon the balls to drop it off the edge of some ravine. Having Bobby around was kind of like having an emotional drill sergeant who was also a really good listener. He also wasn't particularly partial to my mom's school of thinking and that made him even more of an ally than he already was. I didn't realize it at the time but having him available to me during those years made me feel just a little more human.

In March of 2005, he lost his son in Iraq. No one really even knows why he was over there. He was more the long haired, VW beetle, tatooed bartender kind of guy but out of the blue he went and joined the Marines. He was run over by a HumVee while waiting to be picked up for rounds one morning. He was squatting in front of a mound of sand and the sun was in the driver's eyes. The whole thing just seems too ridiculous and stupid for words and makes it all the harder to digest. Bobby wears his tags every day and can't summon enough foul language about the war and the administration.

This past spring, his wife got sick. While in the process of diagnosing her with sclerosis of the liver, Bobby went into major cardiac arrest, threw out his back, and was hospitilized as well. He made it out. She did not. It's been a tough 19 months.

So, it felt good to be with him. To be the listener this time. To put him down on my massage table and get him to snore. It felt good to hear the stories about how he met his wife (his third ~ they married after he left Pa. in 1993), to see that he can tell those stories now and not deflate. He still drinks too much and smokes too many cigarettes but he's walking his own line. It's his to walk. He took me in my grittiest day and now I take him.

The rest of the trip was par for the course. Played dodge ball with old shadows and geographic phantoms. The town used to be a coal town. Blue collar industry gone under and now it's like a Virtual New Jersey Box Store Extravaganza. The whole valley was flooded in '72 and most of the homes and schools and businesses are loaded with asbestos and molds in the basements. When I was about 12 years old, my friend's parents and siblings and aunts and uncles all started dying from random sorts of cancers. It hasn't gotten any better. The place is fairly toxic. Half due to consumer choices. Half due to the environment and pollution. My folks moved out of the valley, out of the toxic house, out of the flood zone and now live on top of the mountain. There are trees on the streets there and the sound of a train late at night. It feels safe to let Ella play out in front of the house. The houses aren't a half a foot from one another like the streets where I grew up. It's not paradise but I feel like we can breathe a little easier there.

My hometown isn't what it used to be. It used to be the typical American melting pot of ethnicity. Mining towns are like that. The Irish and the Welsh, the Lebanese, Syrian, Italian, Polish and Czech all congegrate to make a living. Eventually, their kids start marrying outside the church, outside the lineage. When I was a kid, I grew up with a Lebanese/Irish Catholic family. The wife made killer hummus, grape leaves and baklava but she also prayed to Saint Anthony if she lost something. I spent the better part of my childhood thinking that it was JesusMarionJoseph. I spent my summers swimming with nuns and having cookouts with cousins named Rashad.

But the neighbors started putting their houses on the market and heroine moved in in their place. Lots of heroine. My high school has metal detectors now and state police assigned to the hallways. It's some knarly shit. I always take a drive, though, through those streets when I go back to visit family. I go to the Middle East Bakery in the North End to pick up spinach pies and I drive through my old neighborhood. The streets are more skeletal now but I'm able to remember roller skates on the sidewalks, old men on porches and hide and seek when the street lights went on. I've got some good memories and left there in time to be able to hold onto them. I found the ravine in my travels and threw away the heavy baggage. I kept the good stuff, though. Kept the good stuff and kept some distance. So far it's proved to be a good recipe.