Where Kathleen adores the minuette, the Ballet Russes and Crepes Suzette, well, Robin loves her rock and roll, a not-dog makes her lose control -- what a crazy pair!

Monday, April 09, 2007

the land that I once knew

The road from my home in Brooklyn to my childhood home (which has been continuously occupied by my parents since 1960) leads through the wilds of the BQE, over the Triboro Bridge (Thank you, Robert Moses) through a stretch of the Bronx and then Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess Counties, then the Connecticut border. It becomes increasingly less urban, then less suburban, until the strip malls and auto body places give way to farms and little downtowns that probably look much as they did in 1810, and you have to start worrying about hitting deer and skunks instead of other deranged motorists. Five miles from my childhood home, there emerges from the rural darkness a flashing red light with a four-way stop. We have taken this road from Brooklyn often enough in the past two years that we could navigate it in our sleep (and late at night, that is often what it seems we are doing), yet for some reason my husband always hesitates at this point.

"Right," I always say.

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I am sure. I've seen this corner a million times." I said it most recently two days ago, and was suddenly struck by a thought.

I haven't seen the corner a million times, probably, but it certainly seems like it. For at this corner, if you turned left instead of right and then took the first right, you would turn into the entrance of my high school, which was founded in the 1890s for people planning to send their sons to Yale. It has lots of red brick buildings, elm trees, a 9-hole golf course, and an absurd number of tennis courts. When I was a grade-schooler, in my little town of about 1,000 people, this school (where we went for the occasional school trip, to see dance performances and the like) represented for me all the allure and beauty and sophistication of the larger world, a world I knew only through books and my own imagination. I yearned to go there, and then I did. As a day student, a townie, a charity case, every day I passed through that corner going from home to school early in the morning, straight through the flashing red light, to another world, then coming back again the same night, generally, overworked, sleep-deprived and taciturn. It turned out to be sophisticated all right, but full of misery, at least for me, and the one happy day I spent there was the day I graduated. Yet for better and for worse, my years at that school made me the person I am today. When I left that school, it was for college in New York, just 100 miles as the crow flies but a much longer distance in ways that matter; I never looked back, or thought about it much again. Then I lived other places, other lives, and thought of the school even less; its poison gradually worked its way out of my system.

Now I am back, and at this corner, the other night, it suddenly seemed to me that time had made a circle. If I could only have known, more than two decades ago, stuck at that damn school, hating life and myself, where time would take me: to the corner, right and south, south, south, to the lights of the city, to a job I love, a life I am lucky to have. Would I have felt better about things? Would I have even believed it possibe?

1 Comments:

Blogger Erin said...

Another lovely post, as always.

3:13 PM

 

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