Home is Town

[Verse 2]

If we stop to gaze upon a star

People talk about how bad we are

Ours is not an easy age

We're like tigers in a cage

What a town without pity can do

[Chorus]

The young have problems

Many problems

We need an understanding heart

Why don't they help us?

Try to help us

Before this clay and granite planet falls apart!

~ Town Without Pity (Gene Pitney)

A song for everyone who doesn’t quite fit, who wants to escape, even if the reason for that feeling isn’t quite clear. A town can work like a cradle and soothe us, or it can turn us into martyrs as we try to break free. I listened over and over to this song, aching with every note, knowing the singer was suffering and agonizing ar his portrayal of the pain, the ostracism, the separation from normal life in the town. I used to lie on the cheap but new rug in the front room, the record on my record player, the hurt in my heart, the tears drifting down both cheeks, while I yearned to escape. So often I felt tremendously alone, and songs told my story. Nobody was ever there to listen, however. Nobody.

The Double Hook by Canadian Sheila Watson, was a novel from 1959. It too told of what hurt, but there was no melody. The town was dangerous in the worst way. Cruel characters, redemption a far-off dream. The author has explained the title: “That when you fish for the glory you catch the darkness too. That if you hook twice the glory you hook twice the fear.” As if nobody deserves joy, not if they live in a town like the one in British Columbia, where redemption seems a distant possibility and everyone has some role in the quagmire. Do all towns have to drag us down with them? Do we deserve that? All I knew was I could feel how the pity was missing and its absence could be fatal. However, I didn’t know why life felt so threatening; it was just something I felt.

“Patches.” That was a sad, sad song. A teen tragedy in which the girl, so poor she was named Patches, commits suicide because she thinks the boy doesn’t love her. Poverty can be so cruel, and the town seemed to collaborate with her desperation. And this is part of why I listened over and over, wishing the impoverished girl back to life. The music of the 60s insisted on splitting my heart wide open and tossing me aside. There was a reason for the anguish, so I’ll explain.

The main reason was that we were, in fact, poor. I tried hard not to compare myself to the rest of the world, but it was no use. The urge to compare was unwavering and indefatigable. I was propelled to get out of Dodge, as they say in westerns. I despised all that was bringing me down. That hate was centered - oh, I hate saying this - on a house that was old and in need of level floors and smooth walls. An unkind house that refused to give up all its secrets and frightened me on the few occasions I attempted to crack open a few of the sinister spaces it had. Spaces with no air, only brief margins for slipping in a hand and trying to sort out what must have been horrific tales from simple dusty darkness. Big house, huge, but overworked and with dead zones where air couldn’t enter if it tried.

Nothing would stop me, not the jam-packed closets I never managed to inventory and only had vague ideas of the contents. Doom closets, useless for storing clothes because all the clothing, once placed on a hanger, went into hiding, then suffocated. My brain was also a closet and I could never air it out, because what had happened to me in that house was indelible. I never understood what that was, but it broke me in two and propelled me to other houses, other lands, other places where I continued to nurse my Patches complex, but never confessing my sin that had not been my sin. Somebody else was guilty, but having that old house blurred the difference.

Once out, nevertheless, I could breathe. I was happy that I was familiar with You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. The 1940 novel was different, it had a historical theme that told of a world I’d never know, or so I thought: Nazis in Europe. For me, usurping the title was sufficient, and I used it to justify having left home (old house, the person who was guilty, running away from poverty). All the time I’d shrug my shoulders and give out a sigh of relief. No more ‘home’ for me.

Then the years shifted and I was drifting from one address to another, one town to another, one country to another.Nothing seemed to deter the movements and transitions. I never questioned who I was or what I wanted; nose to the grindstone, I continued to leave home and town in the dust. Every day, every week, moving farther away. Unfortunately, no other home or house moved in and I was tossed onto a heap of non-belongers who may or may not have felt the same as I did, or been the same inside. I walked alone. Estranxeira na súa patria [Foreigner in their land], you could have called me and I would agree without remembering the Pitney song or feeling ragged enough to jump off a bridge like the girl in the song. I did do some assimilation, though, and the author of the line included here was a big help. She traveled through decades, languages, and histories to offer consolation. I accepted, because the alternative was unthinkable.

The problem is, the old house never goes away, even as I rush to remove my mind from what happened inside it, the way I never owned any of its spaces. I can’t forget the splinters in bare feet running over old hardwood floors nor the broken and ancient and probably asbestos kitchen tiles that were embarrassingly ugly. Seared into my mind is the pink circus-y wallpaper that I outgrew and was in a room - my bedroom? - off the most wretched bathroom in the world. Painting it lavender didn’t help. The back room off the kitchen where a washing machine had once lived was must, cold, and most likely haunted. Another space to avoid and to never explore. Probably home to a zillion mice.

That should be the end of this story/not story and a better plot can be found later. However, the house refused silence and often now it joins my stories about almost any topic, set in any place. It respects my reticence to deal with any of the interior, and I have not made any references to the persons who arrived there to die although they may have gone soon after to finish their dying. Except for one or two canning seasons that filled the lopsided, wainscotinged kitchen, there are only a handful of moments. I insist: I don’t need the place, don’t need the memories.

Then another shift. I sense something and escape.

Pulling, tugging…

All around the yard are snowdrops, crocuses, lilies-of-the-valley, spiraea, honeysuckle, snowballs. I can tell you exactly where they are located.

These are not alone in the yard. Lilacs, tulips, peonies, jasmine, bleeding hearts, hydrangea - these too are growing in profusion, all at once, as if April were the same as September. There are more of them than when I was five.

Irises, hyacinth, hens and chicks, pansies, daffodils, narcissus. I am glad I didn’t forget these.

Black walnut, hydrangea, primroses, hollyhocks, rhubarb. Yes, I repeated the hydrangea, because it was a different color and it’s one of the best flowers in the world. I think one was planted by my grandmother.

Also, I get flashes of outdoor scenes that are engraved somewhere beneath my bones. Examples:

Learning to make book covers and homemade mustard. Next door, so inside was all right. I loved my neighbor, but bet she was lonely.

Skating on slate sidewalk. The slate clattered and cracked, but chalked up nicely and gave music to the skate wheels. Putting in concrete killed my skating experience.

The Mummers. They wore immense feathery costumes for the town parade, maybe 4th of July, maybe Memorial Day. Looking back, I’m certain that group from New Jersey was based on figures from Brazilian carnival.

Backyard barbecue. Nothing special, but constructed by a smart father. Set behind an energetic primrose. Center stage, back yard. Used just enough to love its presence, but no more.

Clearly what mattered and matters is external to the house, which was a source of shames. What had value were the plants, bushes, trees, flowers that outlined the old, uneven, chipped bricks. What had value were the bodies of my two pet turtles, killed by me, buried in a glass jar on a cotton ball bed. I left them behind, along with my first and only dog and my first cat.

I left, like a bat out of hell, to escape it all. Yet here it all is, sitting right beside me in this room as I write. A home is a home.