One day in the spring of my senior year of college, the professor of my Contemporary American Poetry seminar asked for a show of hands. The question was simple. She wanted to know how many of us felt as though we had a hometown. I was one of two who raised a hand. At the time, I remember feeling old-fashioned. Old-fashioned in a good way -- old-fashioned like sepia toned photographs and main streets and small businesses and county fairs. That conversation, brief as it was, cast a patina of warmth and romance on the very ordinary, industrial city where I grew up.
Then I moved home and realized what I had really known all along. My hometown is boring. I mean it's really dull. Or maybe it's not so much boring as it's not designed for someone like me. People leave when they graduate high school and don't come back until they are ready to return with their young families to buy starter homes and SUVs they can't afford and don't need. Young, single college graduates do not live there. . . if they can help it.
But anyway, there Iwas -- living in my parents' basement, bored out of my mind and looking for something to do that didn't involve overpriced beer gardens or kiddie carnivals and I came up with an idea. My friend from college, Em, had parked her car in my parent's driveway over the summer and she had left the keys. We could take it for a tour. Show it all the hometown sights. Take pictures. At least it was something to do.
So I invited my friend C., also a recent college graduate, and we started driving. We went to the river and walked around the park. We found our way to the train tracks and took artsy photos of our reflections in the broken glass ourside of abandoned airplane hangers by the old airport. And we drove downtown. All my years growing up, downtown had been a sketchy neighboorhood filled with abandoned buildings, struggling restaurants, and condemned apartments. Oh. And the jail.
It was different now. The change that had started when I was in high school had continued while I'd been away. Downtown was vibrant. The buildings were painted bright yellows and greens and pinks. All the signs were in Spanish, but the pictures told us what was in the stores. On 4th street, we passed a butcher's shop and shrieked with excitement. What a mural! We turned the car around, parked it in front of the mural, and snapped this picture. We took a lot of pictures actually, just like a couple of tourists. And for a moment the patina of hometown romance and the malaise of hometown boredom lifted and it was just another place and we were traveling through it, ready to be enchanted by the details.
