I'm reading the
opening pages of
Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe
Strummer, by Chris Salewicz. I really do not want to put this book
down, but I am distracted by other books and writers. I am
thinking about my lost punk ethic, risk taking, and why I am afraid to piss people
off who desperately need to be pissed off.
The other books and writers distracting me are:
The Place You Love is Gone, Melissa Holbrook Pierson
W.W. Norton
Homecoming Journals, Krisha Chachra
Mountian Trail Press
Pierson is not afraid to piss you off. She is as punk as it gets. She does not try to bring you about gently to the perils facing your favorite places. Hers is the rough middle finger poking you in your glazed-over eye. But she loves those places that are gone and writes of them:
"Five minutes from home and we're driving into the Cuyahoga Valley. From here, I can see that I am driving back years and years, back into childhood, for all that I describe is gone now, or almost all. At the cross of the railroad tracks there is a gas station and a few shops. At another crossroads a half mile later, where one road arches back up the steep hill toward the town of Cuyahoga Falls, there is a a dark little roadhouse called the Lodge, which serves a couple different forms of beef. Then the pavement goes along the banks, and winds under trees, or straightens out past the old farms. One of them is where we pick our Halloween pumpkins, after sitting to be photographed on a small mountain of them in the back of a wagon. The memory struggles under an equal heap of lacerating nostalgia. We simply called this place "the valley," because we knew in some well-obscured part of us that the Cuyahoga was the origin of everything. Not only was it primal in itself, a slow meandering of brown water through quiet brown woods, but we would not be here except for it. We barely notice its existence."
Pierson could be describing the cider mills and sled hills of my own lacerated nostalgia. The train trestles, declining pottery factories and collapsing water towers. The backyard playfields and sandlots. We all love some part of the place where we grew up, even if we fled as fast as we could. We take with us the memories of favorite hangouts, nights out too late, friends who also moved on.
In
Homecoming Journals, Krisha Chachra moves on, and comes home. Very personal stories compiled from her work for the Roanoke Times describe the impact that small-town living and big city chaos have had on the author as a chronicler of the American experience. She came
back to Blacksburg, Virginia for the same reasons many of us choose to relocate here. She also pays tribute to her parents' immigrant experience:
"Thinking about it now, I can imagine naturalization is somewhat like being adopted - or maybe the word is accepted. Life doesn't change, but all of a sudden you feel more like you have a place at the table, like you're standing inside the circle, playing on the team and feeling part of a family. Suddenly everything you worked for, everything you left behind - including the relatives in your native country - everything you've sacrificed, has been worth it. With a simple certificate you feel validated. And you feel, as my parents told me, empowered to go forth without hesitation to meet the opportunity you traveled thousands of miles to sieze. Really, it is a staggering experience."Chachra's book comes to you through the DIY ethic of punk. She wrote a tribute to Blacksburg, found a publisher and got it printed and distributed. She reminds us what a wonderful town this is. Before we are all sitting around over our beers talking about the
gone,
gone place we loved.
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