Writer and humorist James Thurber, having been born and raised in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, once said “the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.” I can’t recall the striking of any memorable clocks during my Ohio childhood, but it seems I’m haunted instead by the cars of Columbus, finding them evocatively indicative of the kind of neighborhood where I grew up and my parents continue to live.
It’s not uncommon to see wrecked cars parked in my parents’ neighborhood. On-street parking is free and ample in my parents’ neighborhood, few folks have garages, and even fewer can afford expensive repairs. If you live in my parents’ neighborhood and your car gets totaled, you probably have to wait for an insurance check–if you even have insurance–before you can make repairs or buy a new ride. In the meantime, you and your family might have to rely upon a different kind of wheels to bring your groceries home.
When I walk Reggie in my parents’ Columbus neighborhood, I take far fewer pictures than I take in either Keene or Newton. It isn’t an issue of Columbus being less interesting or photogenic since I’m convinced my penchant for the old and abandoned was born in the gritty neighborhood where I grew up. Instead, I take fewer photos in my old Columbus neighborhood because I, unlike Thurber, haven’t yet discovered how to bridge the space between the world I come from and the world I now find myself.
Being a wandering photo-blogger is strange enough in New England, where my neighbors have both computers and Internet access. In a high-crime, low-income, digitally-deprived suburb of central Ohio, my laptop finds No Available Networks when I try to pirate free wifi, and wandering with dog and digicam is outright strange and possibly dangerous. As a result, I try to be extremely discreet as I explore my old neighborhood, pulling out my camera only when no one is around and something is odd or unusual enough to scream “snap me.”
My old neighborhood, after all, likes to keep its secrets as well as its treasures hidden, and as a former-resident-turned-outsider, I try to respect locals’ sense of both privacy and pride.
More than anything, I think, it is culture shock that makes it difficult to photograph, make sense, and then blog the world I come from now that I’ve returned to this, the very different world where I now live. Yesterday morning, I packed my car in a gritty Columbus alley; this afternoon, after driving all day yesterday and now finding my feet after a good night’s sleep, I unpacked the same car here in Newton, a tony suburb of Boston. Here in Newton, I needn’t fear the neighbors’ chained pitbulls and Rottweilers will attack me or Reggie when we go for a morning stroll; here in Newton, people don’t park wrecked cars in front of their houses. When I walk my dog in my parents’ neighborhood, I am acutely aware that I am the only lone white woman walking a street where brown faces are the norm; when I walk my dog in Newton, I am acutely aware that I couldn’t on an adjunct instructor’s salary afford to live here.
How far, then, is it from my parents’ neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio to the lush and leafy streets of Newton, Massachusetts?
A long day’s drive will take you from one world to another, the divide between them being more than miles.
Aug 14, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Welcome back. Walked in my neighborhood here in Belmont last night while it was getting dark, and not a worry in the world.
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Aug 15, 2007 at 2:04 am
Maybe when you start dreaming like Thurber, you’ll bridge the space between your first and present worlds. Why, I can hear it now:
“The cars I drive in my dreams are often the cars of Columbus.” “The carts I push in my dreams are often the carts of Columbus.”
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Aug 15, 2007 at 8:55 am
Lorianne, what an interesting piece on the in between place (and I read your earlier one where you talk about the contrast in depth). I too felt the distance between my mother (now dead) and me, not so much in her daily activities and habits (which were indeed different than mine) but in the circle of friends she acquired after my father’s early death and the direction she took once she was on her own and became herself, so to speak. I had no idea she was such a sparkling flirtatious outgoing woman, and such a good teacher. (She taught ballroom dancing for 30 years.)
Sometimes she would see me walking and pull over to offer me a ride, and it was almost like getting into the car with a stranger the way she acted kind of shy and vulnerable with me. It tore at my heart, and I didn’t know what to do sometimes. She would even say things like “well….nice to … see you” and that was worse than anything. My own mother. Not sure how to act with her beautiful talented powerful daughter (her words, not mine). It made my heart ache. And at the same time I couldn’t grow back down for her; my own self was too important to me.
So, the quandary. Where am I? Who am I? What happened to my mother? Etc.
I have two friends who come from Michigan, one an academic who now teaches in Amherst, the other a nurse, whose education mostly came in bits and pieces and extensive reading; she is also a musician (piano, marimba). The first has always maintained that Michigan is in the east. The other knows she’s from the midwest.
What you’ve written about home and not home is one of those deep lonlinesses of life, isn’t it. The thing you can never quite get at, and never quite leave alone.
Thanks.
Teresa
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Aug 15, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Leslee, I’m glad you’re enjoying your new neighborhood: the city offers its own delights.
Peter, I think the thing Thurber has that I lack is a unremitting sense of humor. Thurber could make fun of his Ohio childhood in a way that I still can’t.
Teresa, I think the sensation of being “between” various homes/landscapes is actually a common experience, and your comment corroborates that. Few of us die in the same town where we were born; the American dream requires us to be upwardly mobile, and that often involves movement. The world our parents moved in isn’t necessarily the world we move in, and this disconnect is jarring. Perhaps we all are strangers in a strange land.
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Aug 21, 2007 at 12:49 pm
The chained dog piece I found especially poignant…having lived in many different places, and then returning to live near the home of my roots, I was struck anew by how chaining a dog for life was so commonplace. It was this horrible division between what I knew could/should be and what I was seeing that drove me to form Dogs Deserve Better, a national nonprofit working to free the chained and penned dog. For more info, please visit us at http://www.dogsdeservebetter.org.
Thanks again for a thought-provoking article. Tammy S. Grimes
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