Hometown

Last month I watched 30 whole minutes of a movie before realizing it had been filmed in my own home town. Suddenly I realized I recognized those chesty buildings, I even recognized  the light itself for light over water has a special look, and my city is a city of waters.I wasn't born there really, but I think of it as my hometown anyway. We moved there when I was nine and the world just ...opened up for me. I got to go to the public schools and ride bikes with the kids in my classes when school got out. I fell in love with every tree in our neighborhood, with the bell Mrs. Talbot used to summon her kids home, with the snuffling sounds the dogs made on their jingling early-morning rounds.And seeing that movie brought it all back.'What an Eden!’ I thought as I watched and 'how lucky I was to live in a place with parades and winning teams and every high school formal like an old-time cotillion with an actual Grand March at the beginning!'All this was last month.This month, on the very first hour of the first day it was showing, I drove back to my hometown to see a second movie that was not only filmed in Lowell Massachusetts but is about that city during some of her hardest years, now thankfully behind us all.It tells the story of a boxer and his relationship with the family that both encouraged him and held him back. We see the peeling paint, the abandoned mill buildings, the local jail where a neighborhood dad took his little sons to put the fear of God in them as he told our mom. In other words, we see a much darker picture of the city I grew up in, whose problems are every city’s problems.Some people fear all cities, saying there is danger in them. Once, curfews were mandatory in all cities, partly because no street was safe before the dawn of artificial light.Homes weren’t safe either: The word ‘curfew’ is from the French. ‘Cover the fire’ it means, since always there was a great fear of conflagration and rightly so: In 1666 four-fifths of the great city of London was destroyed by an oven fire in the king’s own bakery.So you could say there is danger wherever there are people. Or wild animals. Or disease. Or even weather like the storm we are now having here in the east.And yet we sleep each night in faith that all will be well.I look back over the last month and marvel at the affection I've been feeling for that old city, I guess because we are all like the infant in the mother’s arms: what we look on when we first come awake in life is what we love and think of as home.The darkness finds us there, and so we light the lamps, and lie down and take our rest.