The Past is Our True Home Town

Anytown High School here - sigh. Immediately after I wrote yesterday’s piece about an old Atlantic City-style beach town I was  invited to join a Facebook page called "I Remember Revere When…”  I don’t in fact "remember Revere when" but I’m glad for all the people who do, as I see them happily writing about their bikes and their hangouts and the brightly striped tube socks of the era.Last Sunday I spent the better part of an hour on a page called “You Know Your from Lowell when…” and yeah sure it bothers me that whoever put up this page misspelled the short form for "you are" but it seems mean to point that out, the site being full of so many tender memories.Turns out I'm very nostalgic about the place where I came of age and have been since long before Mark Wahlberg made The Fighter there. Before Ricky Gervais and the dimpled Jennifer Garner filmed The Invention of Lying on its streets too. I wrote about both films, one at the end of December of 2010 and one nearer to that month's start.  Lowell became my home when I was 9 and I lived there until the summer after freshman year in college when a prescription for diet pills so altered my judgment that I was walking eight miles to my job every day, madly cleaning the house when I got home at night, and generally living like a combination over-achieving social worker/nun and a speed freak. (I swear all the doctors who gave those pills out to people should have been barred from practicing medicine.)In early adulthood I probably thought the place hadn't affected me much but it did. Of course it did, though in a graduating class of 988 kids I really knew my neighborhood pals and the other drama-and-chorus nerds like myself.  We sigh looking back at the fashions of our young years.Whether it was the Princess Grace-style French twist or feathered-back Farrah-style bangs or that signature 80s  look like Jennifer Beals had in Flashdance when her hair rose like a living Burger King crown from the top of the head.Poodle skirts, saddle shoes, minis, maxis, the images of a hundred styles and ways to be all live in our minds. All are waiting for us, held and kept safe for us in the memories of the ones we are moving through time with. It's wonderful isn't it?

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.