Last night, I went to visit a friend in the old neighborhood. I drove up my street. Really, the place looks pretty much the same. Sure, a new privacy fence by the house across the street from ours (or, what used to be ours). Nothing more.
As always when I pass this way, I looked up at the windows of our place and tried to see the inside. Not to see the new family’s way of doing things, but to bring back that feeling of home that came from living there.
It was a boring neighborhood, but a good home, albeit too expensive for us, for me to maintain.
In between the move out of the suburbs and the move to my condo, I spent two years living in downtown Madison. I felt as transient there as the students who moved in and out to my east, and the much maligned transient population that loved to hang out at the small park to my west. Oddly, it felt right for me then. I belonged to their limbo worlds.
But I knew eventually I would look for a home.
I suppose it is my fate to then move into a neighborhood in Madison that is anything but stable, though in ways that are perhaps silly. A year ago, there were office buildings next to us. Six months later, there was a gaping hole and the promise of a new Whole Foods, a small hotel and who knows what else. Now, it's all up for grabs again. A week back, our parking lot felt quiet, and now we’re contemplating the expected changes as a new fitness center has leased space on the ground floor of the condo building, with the potential to transform this building, though it’s unclear in what way. Weird.
I’m close to a mall that is trying to appear more urban and less mallsy. New shops open, but they, too, feel very temporary. How can a silly wine shop and a fancy chocolatier survive here? I like l’Occitane, but it’s a frivolous place and we aren’t a frivolous town.
Each time I bike past this little shopping street, I look for closures. They wont surprise me. The street itself seems unreal – like out of a movie set. I don’t want to like it because I know it wont be there in the way that it is now, tomorrow.
Purchase photo 1945
When I travel back to Warsaw, I go back to my favorite pastry shops (there are two that I love). I sit down and think how it was when I ate cakes and doughnuts there forty years back. I do note new places in the city – products of a new ordering of life since I lived there, but there are enough old places that Warsaw itself feels very much the same.
Nothing about where I live and how I live right now feels stable (beyond my teaching). And so, as I bike to work, I have come to believe that the lake path that I follow each morning is my constant. It is mine every day and it hasn’t changed much since the years I took my daughters down to visit the Lake Mendota area.
The rest? One day at a time.
I remember that street, and it always seemed out of place to me. The commercial stretches along Monroe and Willie Streets, and even the little one on East Johnson, really feel like they belong in their neighborhoods. This neighborhood looks and feels as if it was lifted wholesale out of The Truman Show.
ReplyDeleteMy former wife (who is now my great date) and I talk about these things often. But it has happened more dramatically back in Norway, in the little coastal town where she grew up. The first time I met her parents, I was able to take a fine train on time from Oslo and head south, eventually getting off after three hours or so in a village at an aged but well maintained old station. I walked up the hill and around the corner and there we were. That was in 1976. Needless to say, the train doesn't stop there any more and hasn't for years, and the station is vacant and dilapidated. Even the "new" station in nearby Porsgrunn is no longer served by a stationmaster, the ticket booths are gagged, tickets are available only in a kiosk adjacent. The trains are seldom, rarely on time, and sometimes don't even come at all! The service indifferent, the rates a mystery to everyone. The little flower shop is closed in the village, the grocery store is no longer, also the postoffice, the konditori, closed. Old women in identical dark blue hats have no place to drink coffee. We talk about the old village and the bicycle I used - my wife's old NBS (Norges Beste Sykkel) - every day when we stayed with mormor and morfar and our boys would run around naked and find wild strawberries and snails and join the other children once a week to wait for the new Donald to arrive at the gasoline station. The last time I was in Eidanger at the old house, I came alone to move my mother-in-law to an apartment. I pumped up the tires on the old NSB and pedalled into Porsgrunn to find the little fish shop in the alley where my silent - and now dead - stonecutter father-in-law would slip to get gasping fresh mackerel for a summer treat that mormor would serve with a fresh cucumber salad. Oh what a bony fish. No fish shop now. Not even an alley. There are no longer lines of big cordurouy Brio baby buggies parked outside the bakery.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just the cities that are losing those special places. The villages and small towns are, too.
Soon all we'll see anywhere are recreations of old streets, but there still won't be anyplace for the old women in identical dark blue hats to have coffee. Here's a challenge: Look for the old people on those new streets with fine signs ...