A Walk Through My Hometown Which Turns Out To Be Less Dreary Than I Remember
A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from my brother-in-law. Calls from Dennis are usually not good news. They tend to happen because my sister is busy patching some new crack in the Greene-family piecrust and therefore cannot make the call herself.
Turns out that my mother had lost all her short-term memory in one fell swoop. Boom. Gone. Didn’t know who the president was, what year it was. Heck, she didn’t know what time it was even though she seemed to be desperately interested—she kept asking my sister about it every 30 seconds or so.
Over Mum’s strenuous protests, Bethie dragged her to the local hospital for testing. Until I could get there, Bethie, Den and my brother Randy took turns caring for my dad, who suffered a stroke a few years ago and needs help with things. After a few days in the hospital, Mum made a dramatic recovery and was itching to get home to boss her beloved prisoner around again. She normally doesn’t tolerate any help whatsoever, but she must have been grateful that her brainworks hadn’t collapsed entirely because she let me stay on for a few days. After her first day home from the hospital, it was all I could do to stop her from waiting on me instead of the other way around, so I decided to take a long walk.
I have a fairly tortured relationship with my hometown. On the one hand, I’m proud of my working-class roots, but on the other hand Southbridge’s economically-depressed, post-industrial dreariness does tax the poetic soul. As an artistic kid in a place that only had love for the football and cheerleading squads, I escaped by age 18 for college and then the far-more-fascinating Babylon that is New York City. However, Southbridge holds one piece of turf that is dearer to me than just about any outside of Scotland—my grandfather’s grave.
I selected a circuitous set of backroads to get to the cemetery and set out with my hands in my pockets, my head down, and my iPod cranking some tune for the disaffected. (My musical tastes tend to run toward mournful anyway.) As I walked, I was struck by how… well… how good the old town looked. I mean the tenement apartments (wooden triple-deckers), while of an eternally unattractive design, were mostly done up in newer clapboard-style vinyl siding. The roads had fewer potholes than here in much posher Milford. I walked by a playground that was awash with happy, brown-skinned kids. The little ones played tag while the older ones shot baskets through hoops with actual intact chains—another one-up on Milford. (By the way, the brown children belong to Southbridge’s Puerto Rican community, which was stranded there without job prospects sometime in the 70s after the factories shut down—the same factories that had attracted waves of French Canadians, Irish, Greeks, Poles, Romanians, Albanians and various others before them; catapulting those groups into the middle class, so they could look down their noses at the next wave of immigrants.) It appeared that the landlords of my hometown had invested in their properties during the boomtimes that immediately preceded the Great Recession of Aught-7, 8, 9 and 10. This gladdened my calloused little heart no end.
When I finally located my grandfather’s grave, I stood for a while and stared at it. I was surprised by the little pansy motif in the corners of the granite marker, just as I am every time I see it. They were selected no doubt by my grandparents for the infant they buried beneath it in 1923. I was named for that baby—Margaret Ellen Greene, a name I’ve since changed to Meg Eilidh; Meg because no one ever called me Margaret anyway, and Eilidh because it’s the Gaelic form of Ellen. My grandfather was a lone spot of attention in the maelstrom that was my homelife as a very young child. He read to me for hours and I listened. In my darkest times, it’s his spirit that I pray to for help, and in my happiest triumphs, it’s his heart that I credit for showing me I mattered all those years ago.
A text to my cellphone vibrated in my pocket, interrupting my little reverie. It was Bethie. “Where are you? I’m making you dinner!” I texted her back and she picked me up at the graveyard.
“You can cook for me, but I’m buying the wine,” I told her. “We’ll toast Grampy and the doctors who bullied Mummy into taking her meds.”
We clinked imaginary wineglasses and drove home.