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scale model of my childhood
Wednesday, November 21 2007
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
This morning we left at around 9am on a drive down to Silver Spring for another Thanksgiving with Gretchen's family.
Using its interactive "drag the route" feature (did you know about it? I discovered it by accident!), I'd compared the distance and predicted time of various routes to Silver Spring and decided that the best route that didn't include the New Jersey Turnpike was the one involving somewhat more than thirty miles of non-interstate through Princeton, New Jersey. The New Jersey Turnpike was best avoided because of its proclivity for gridlock, particularly during days of heavy traffic. And the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is widely know to be the busiest travel day of the year. The weather was sunny, warm, and beautiful for driving and we encountered almost no congestion. A side benefit to our route was that going down I-95 on the west side of the Delaware gave us a good visual fly-by of the skyscrapers of central Philadelphia.
After arriving at Gretchen's parents' house, there was a flurry of activity in the kitchen as prep work and what not was done for tomorrow's meal, which was to be both entirely vegan and have an actual United States Congressman in attendance.
Later Gretchen and I rode with her parents out to a vegetarian café in College Park called the Berwyn Café. Gretchen's mother and father each have a Toyota Prius, and each is equipped with a fancy GPS system, a dashboard control that perfectly suits Gretchen's father's geeky predilections. Somehow the GPS was letting us down, though, so we had to ask an old man who was in the process of heading out to the bowling lanes with his longhaired son/grandson. The latter spoke with a Shenandoah Valley accent and gave directions that included a liquor store.
The neighborhood near the Berwyn Café contained Greenbelt Road, familiar from the childhood I'd spent in Maryland (ending in April, 1976). And the Berwyn Café seemed strangely familiar as well, at least in terms of the relationship between its storefront and those of its neighborhood. We'd arrived just after closing time, and were pretty much the only customers there, but the staff at the Berwyn didn't care. They were very nice and prepared us each delicious vegetarian (and it may have all been vegan) food. I had the best falafel I'd had since I was in Isræl.
I told the others that when I was a kid living somewhere in this area, my parents always used to take me to a natural foods store called Beautiful Day. It featured a vegetarian restaurant in the back, and I could still remember the delicious sandwiches I used to have there, full of sprouts and other things that, at age seven, I would have normally hated but, in combination, managed to like. I also remembered the vaguely-sexual hippie smell of bulk food, sneaking cashews from the nut bins, and being both freaked-out and intrigued by the glowing heads in the cover art on a Carlos Castaneda paperback. When Gretchen's father mentioned "Beautiful Day" to our waitress, she said that that had once been the name of this place, the Berwyn Café. That mysterious wave of nostalgia had been the murmur of synapses that hadn't fired in three decades.
When we piled back into the Prius, someone suggested we find out where my old childhood home in Lanham had been. With GPS there on the dashboard, this was easily done. 7004 Dolphin Road, Lanham Maryland was five miles away, rather further afield than I expected given the frequency of trips I remember taking to Beautiful Day. So, what the hell, we drove there.
The last time I'd visited my old Lanham neighborhood had been some 19 years ago, as a twenty year old. That previous visit had taken place during the short period of time when I'd first been friends with Gretchen (before our twelve year estrangement), back when she was only seventeen years old. I'd visited her on my way north to visit my then-actual-girlfriend, Joy Powley (in King of Prussia, PA). We'd taken the bus out to Lanham and walked around my old neighborhood, and I'd found it small and intact, and been astounded by the size of a tree my father had transplanted from the back house foundation to the edge of the street. Here is my account from that visit, from my handwritten January 7th, 1989 diary entry (misspellings and all):
We found a seedy little mall and in a drugstore, we found a map. New Carrolton, it turns out, is closer to Lanham (the address of my Maryland home town) than Greenbelt is. So Gretch and I caught the New Carrolton bus, awkward in our ignorance of municipal bus travel as white upper-middle class kids are bound to be. We sat in the back and listened to some brothers talking about some homosexual guy and folks they called "niggers." The bus ride was long and the bus was tired, barely climbing some hills and shaking, bumping and rattling. We got off at the New Carrolton Metro Station, which we could have taken a metro to, and then, through the wet, grey, dreary, cold weather we walked, and continued too, until we came to Goodluck Road, a road defining one side of the block I used to live on. Things started looking familiar. I showed Gretch the share-crop garden my Dad used to keep at the Pro's house. It was all bushy and weedy now. But at one time, my Dad raised veges there. Finally, we were on Dolphin road. Everything looked so small. It felt like I could stride accross the street in a single bound. But at one time, the road had been a vast, forbidden gulf. There was my old house - 7004 Dophin Road, Lanham, Maryland. In the house lived a late middle-aged white couple. Everything was quite the same, except the old grape vine was huge now, and the big willow oak my Dad had once manhandled and transplanted to in front of the house was huge now - 30 feet tall and as big around as a small person's waste. The trees had all grown, and seemed to be still there. The only difference wass the woods behind the house, which had been gravely abridged. For instead of the woods extending all the way to the road back behind the house, another row of houses occupied that far road so the woods were reduced to a narrow strip. But the expectations I had held had been lower. We walked the half mile to my old elementary school - Magnolia Elementary, and I was surprised to find a sign on the front door or near abouts telling of the sorts of punishment students will have to face if they bring weapns (firearms and switchblades) to school. One must recall that the oldest kids at the school are 6th graders. I think times must have changed. I don't think such a sign existed back when I went to school there. The doors were locked, so we couldn't go in. We walked the path where my smaller feet had gone before, through the metal poles restraining the motorcycles, through a short bitsy strip of woods, past where once had been a derelect truck that, as a small child I thought I'd drive away into freedom some day. We continued towards Goddard Space Flight Center, through an accumulation of five-story type apartment buildings. There had been such buildings when I was younger, but now there were more than ever before. We went as far as my old nursery school. I hadn't remembered its shape or that it was actually a modified swimming pool building. It was still a nursery school, but it seemed more run-down now. And it had some very religious name now, something like "blazing faith day-care center." Gretch and I walked around it and saw the swimming pools behind. And like spokes from a hub, around the nursery school were apartment buildings, more than there ever were. In front of the school were were the tiny tracks of little kids stamped out in the snow. Gretch thought them very cute. We desided, or I desided, that we should go. I didn't think there was really much more to see. So we walked back to Goodluck road and caught a bus back to New Carrolton (we hadn't known such buses existed). ON the bus there was a little black kid and his daddy. The little kid was loud and obnoxious and the daddy kept saying, "Shut-up!" Gretchen really got a kick out of that. Gretchen really thinks little black kids are cute — much cuter than white kids.
I hadn't read that paragraph since I'd written it, so I was surprised by the unusual willow-like leaves of that oak my father had transplanted. The tree had now grown massive, with a diameter at breast height of more than two feet. It had been the biggest tree on the street nineteen years ago, and it had greatly extended its lead in that time. Gretchen's father took a few pictures and made jokes about knocking on the door of my old house and asking for a tour, a mortifying idea.
I pointed out "Mr. Hopsher's Hill," a sloped lawn on the corner of Dolphin and Saffron. An elaborate two car garage made of brick had materialized behind the house where Jenny Mothershead (my best friend next door) had lived. But the ugly multicolored brickwork at 7003 Dolphin Road (the basis for a mental template I've used to measure all such brickwork since) was identical to the way it had been 31 years before. I actually felt somewhat unnerved by how little had changed. The neighborhood (a deliberately ahistorical place of raised ranches alternating with split levels) was so faithful to my memories that it was as I if I was walking around in some elaborate scale model of my childhood, one brought into existence by forces acting outside the normal laws of nature. I say "scale model" because of its apparent diminutive scale. My strides reach much further than they did when I actually lived here, and I carry my head two feet higher above the ground.
On the way back to Silver Spring, we passed an elaborate Hindu Temple only a few blocks from my childhood house. It featured ornate towers of gleaming white lit from below by floodlights. Impulsively, we pulled into the driveway to have a better look. It turned out to be the Murugan Temple of North America. From a distance it was impressive, but up close it was actually rather drab, with most surface made of humble painted concrete. Through the windows, we could see various shrines, and though some were elaborate, it was hard to filter out the dreary vibes radiating down from the dropped ceilings and up from the linoleum tile floor. But as Gretchen pointed out later, different cultures "see" different things while other things don't concern them. The British never used to take teeth into account when judging someone's beauty, and evidently floor and ceiling materials are of no special concern when building a Hindu temple.
We could see a few people inside engaging in various rituals, and eventually we found a door and walked inside. We looked at the shrines, taking note of the offerings to the various deities (these were usually fruits or flowers - never meat). A group of Brahmans were parading around, chanting various incantations. Eventually Gretchen's father asked one of the people there about some things and went on to buy a little guide to the shrines from a couple guys sitting at a pair of shabby computer workstations. Gretchen's father is left handed, so he offered the money with his left hand, a faux pas promptly corrected by the guy he was handing it to.
Further afield, I was struck by how urban the surrounding landscape had become since I'd lived here. Now it was full of vast strip malls and occasional office towers. The stores were all national chains, and any local character this place had once had had been obliterated. It was depressing like the San Fernando Valley is depressing, only more so because of its connection to my childhood.
Me with the tree my father transplanted in front of my old childhood home in Lanham, Maryland.
Gretchen joins me.
From a greater distance.
The Murugan Temple's back door, which is its main entrance.
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