A little while before daybreak this morning I woke, thinking about Teri's question I'd read last evening: "Why did you (adamantly?) vow you would never return to Ann Arbor? Was it so bad? Or was there an event that triggered this dramatic sentiment?"
I'd said something in my blog about Leaving Ann Arbor FOREVER! and though to me at age 20 it seemed obvious, I realize it may not be so.... Answer: I rejoiced that I was not going to be buried alive in this hick town!
My kids, who if they had grown up in their Santa Barbara milieu for their first 20 years of life might understand what I meant, were instead joined to the IBM System ("I've Been Moved") that was so prevalent when John and I got married, and so they were cast out of the town of their birth, weeping and gnashing their teeth, and became citizens of The Real World.
Teri and the others may never fully comprehend how smothering and stultifying it felt for me to graduate from 18 years in one small-town cocoon – to find myself enclosed in a boring little prison, walled in forever: "My God, Montresor: have pity!"
Looking at my old hometown now, from the perspective of 50-plus years of world citizenship, I can't help but wonder if today's Ann Arbor High School graduates could understand my ancient angst. Due to the great communications revolution that is still expanding into the 21st century, I have to wonder if these future citizens can posssibly feel that walled-in.
Yet, if given my birth family's Zeitgeist ("Money is tight, the future uncertain; you ain't goin' nowhere" was my graduation anthem) a lower middle class scholar of 2009 might still feel glued to this plot of ground in Michigan.
Luckily for me, the gates opened wide in 1955, when my father was forced by his several physical problems to retire permanently from his dead-end job here – and my parents, fueled by their old itchy-foot syndrome, began to feel their California mojo working again. As so many years earlier, when I was just a baby, Dad's poor health issues sent them westward to California in a fruitless search for the pot of gold, they were ready at last to fare forth to Lotusland; and I and my two siblings escaped with them into the wide world.
I remember walking often to the old bridge that spans the New York Central rail tracks by the Ann Arbor depot yet today, gazing down at the trains as they pulled out and whispering a line from one of my mother's favorite poems: "There isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going!" That's what I felt then; anywhere would be better than here.
I still believe that may be true; but I've come to think that those old prison walls were in my own head, and that eventually I would have left Ann Arbor – if only in my dreams.
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4 comments:
How interesting, Mom. You are right, hard for your IBM/world-citizen kids to relate to.
I have to say, I immediately thought of that old Paul Simon song:
In my little town
I grew up believing
God keeps His eye on us all
And He used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
Lord I recall
My little town
Coming home after school
Flying my bike past the gates
Of the factories
My mom doing the laundry
Hanging our shirts
In the dirty breeze
And after it rains
There's a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It's not that the colors aren't there
It's just imagination they lack
Everything's the same
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
In my little town
I never meant nothin'
I was just my father's son
Saving my money
Dreaming of glory
Twitching like a finger
On the trigger of a gun
Leaving nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
I don't find it that hard to relate to. I found California to be the same for me, although no one else ever seemed to understand why. I would never fit in there, and I knew it. Maybe it's because I had lived in so many different parts of SB and gone to so many schools, that by the time we left, there wasn't much left for me that seemed new.
CA also seems to me to be the place people go to escape other places, or it was when I was young. Few people actually seemed to be FROM there. In any event, I didn't like it.
I also think there's something about Michigan, possibly that there are a few towns with a lot of open space in between, and the state itself is between so many other destinations, Chicago and Canada in particular. Dave's dad was dying to get his family out when they left, and none of the kids really understand why. I've heard Bob describe it a lot like you have. I've also learned that I can often tell when someone is from Michigan. It's a lot like Garrison Keillor's description of MN Lutherans - no boat-rocking, no strident or exuberant behavior, be a good neighbor, behave. I think the ones who leave are the ones who need to bust out once in a while.
Great stuff, Mom, really enjoying reading about your journey...
I know I've stayed in Santa Cruz because I love it, but I know it's giving my kids a particular perspective that I never had. Of course this is a pretty nice place to live, so I don't think either of them feel a sense of being trapped in this town. But they do probably wonder what else is out there.
Dear Souffle: it was the Garrison Keillor syndrome that drove me crazy all right: mainly, the part where he describes the attitude he got from adults when he was a kid: "You think you're something, but you're not: you're nothing!" I fear if I'd stayed in AA that would have been my mantra forever.
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