Last weekend, my daughter and I navigated four cancelled flights due to weather to visit my Mom in Kansas City, which was a very nice treat. I played handyman, dabbling in plumbing and carpentry and wiring and computer programming. My daughter built a new affordable slow fashion aesthetic through carefully curated thrift store trips, and a few extremely fortunate finds.
I was a bit of the third wheel here…useful to hold the selected items, yet always a few steps behind she and her grandmother.
“What do you think of this?” she asked a great deal, and only once did I respond negatively, because children should never wear macrame, even in irony.
Each thrift store was more vast than the last - huge midwestern hangars with not-quite-bright-enough lighting and hundreds of clothes racks surrounded by books, toys, shoes, and for some reason always a section of vases. As we traveled from store to store, I related brief, unsolicited stories about my childhood, which became harder and harder to tell because so many of the places I remembered had disappeared, razed to the ground and replaced with chain stores.
Somewhere around here was a fancy mall with strangely accurate mid-century Spanish architecture that felt like an open air market in Barcelona that just happened to sell hot dogs and Orange Julius.
Oh. It’s that Lowe’s now.
The movie theatre hurt the most. The Glenwood. I actually saw my very first movie there, Oliver, when I was 4. We dressed in Sunday clothes because it was a fancy thing to go a movie house where they handed out programs. It is also where I saw Star Wars for the first (and second and third and maybe fifth) time. It was a glorious place with a grand chandelier and deep red carpets and a two story curtain that slowly parted to reveal the screen.
Wal-Mart didn’t even think about moving in to the old space; they just tore down everything to a parking lot level and built a giant big metal box.
Someone did save that chandelier, though.
The past is as slippery as soap in a rainstorm… even as we hold on to it, it’s melting. Where is that drive-in? that shopping mall? that record store? that airport? It’s weird taking your kid home and then having not a lot of what you remember there to show. No wonder we take so many pictures nowadays.
I have some photos of the apartment I grew up in, but not on purpose, mostly birthday cake blowing-out pictures or Easter Sunday clothes snaps. My mother moved into her current house when I left for college; it’s a wonderful place, definitely “home” now. But metaphorically, as well as logistically, we can’t go back to that original house.
My mother can’t visit her childhood house either, it was sold years ago. Same with where my wife grew up. And even my daughter can’t visit the first little flat where she lived, because the landlord finally made a deal with somebody that demo-ed it down to the studs and then gave it one of those modern featureless plasterboard makeovers with pre-fab hardwood floors and mid-level brushed brass fixtures.
My current mid-life wist-a-palloza is clearly the fault of the turtle.
As a child I was told that the turtle “carried its house on its back, living in the same one all their lives”. They clearly couldn’t invite anyone over, but there was an enviable consistency there. Bears lived in caves. Rabbits in holes. Now I am mature, having watched many a nature special – I understand what an exoskeleton is, and that bears don’t live in the same cave forever (they actually leave right after they hibernate and rarely come back), and that rabbits may live in many burrows in their lifetimes.
Come to think of it, a great deal of my early nature knowledge may have been based on cartoon animals. That same part of my brain has a clear memory of Aquaman speaking to seahorses.
I can’t go backwards looking for where I came from; I’m neither as energetic or delicious as a salmon. I’ve felt at home in quite a few places, and honestly, that gold shag carpeting in my childhood bedroom would not have retained its effortless grooviness 50 years later. Better to tell the stories, appreciate the where that was, and build new memories as we go along.
You Can't Go House Again.