...
The Ol' Double B
At least once every two months or so, I head back to my hometown of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. The trips are generally the same in tone and activity: I spend time with my Mom... I visit my sister and her husband and their son Colin... I'll sometimes see my aunt, uncle and cousins... I spend time with friends who are still local to the area... I do laundry for free... I eat good homemade food... I sleep well (although it's too quiet there, and I usually have to sleep with music on... I'm so used to that ambient layer of noise endemic to sleeping three stories above a busy Harlem street)... and I'm usually reminded in some way that I don't really live there anymore.
This trip home was not much different as to activity... but the tone of this weekend felt specifically more nostalgic. I couldn't pinpoint a reason for it, but the whole weekend, I felt like I operated under an invisible cloud of wistfulness. I specifically felt it when I woke up Saturday morning.
**********
I was on the way out the door to meet Nowell at our longtime breakfast haunt, Rich's Other Place (his "first" place is Rich's Deli, about two miles down the road). Remembering that I had brought home no CDs, I rummaged through a closet upstairs and found a storehouse of my old tapes, a throwback to a time when my car had only a cassette player and Ben would dub various CDs to tape for me. One of the cases that caught my eye this morning was emblazoned with four letters: GYBE. I snatched it up, said bye to Mom, and ran out the door to her waiting station wagon (my only direct means of conveyance in PA).
The tape was the album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven by Godspeed You Black Emperor (I forego the inclusion of the exclamation point in their name... even they don't know where it belongs). As I drove through my neighborhood toward the familiar Route 202, the music welled up and filled my head with memories of almost every facet of growing up in this area. I couldn't contain them all... I began speaking out loud to myself, as if I were telling a stranger in the passenger seat the stories that were flooding me... "Chris lived down that road for awhile..." "That's where I waited for the bus in elementary school..." "This was always a good 'jump hill' while driving..." I rolled the windows down and kept telling myself little mini-stories about how "that's where [high school girlfriend] and I would park together..."
Nowell and his girlfriend Sadie met me at Rich's, and we shared stories of how our lives had been going over the best breakfast money can buy. I had Sally's Special: two eggs (scrambled, as always), bacon, two pancakes, wheat toast with butter and jelly, decaf coffee and a comically large plastic cup of ice cold water. The three of us talked and laughed, reminiscing on the role this restaurant played in some of our high school TV lab movies. [For those in the know: the Budget Productions DVD is slated to be finished and released sometime before we all turn 50 years old. Please be patient. It will build the anticipation for what is destined to be the greatest DVD ever compiled. At least, to me.] A sort of scary revelation over breakfast was that our server was [high school girlfriend]'s youngest sister, who was about 8 when [high school girlfriend] and I dated.
After breakfast, the rose-tinted day continued with a visit to my lifelong barber, Alex. Alex has been cutting my hair since I had any hair to cut. He used to operate his shop with a man named Nick Tino, whose name was on the door. After Nick decided to retire, another barber named Dave filled the chair, and he recently purchased the shop from Nick and moved it to a new location two doors down Ambler's main drag, Butler Pike. The name and the location of the shop are different, but Alex is still Alex... I barely have to say a word to him about how I want my hair cut. He just knows. He's the best in the business.
On the way back to Mom's house, Godspeed played on. While rounding the bend along Jolly Road, I approached the spot where grill smoke blows across the street. There's a place called Mermaid which hosts family and corporate barbecues, and the fence borders the street. All through the summer, the smell of grilling hot dogs and hamburgers billows over the fence and into the open windows of passing cars. I rolled the windows down, slowed to about 10mph, and breathed in the smell that will always remind me of summer in Blue Bell. Then I drove around the block, turned the radio up and did it again.
**********
I've lived in New York for over two years now, and I really do consider it home. I have a well-established life here that I appreciate every moment I'm alive. But there's something different about calling a place "home" and calling a place a "hometown." I know that I'd be uncomfortable living in Blue Bell at this stage of my life... it just doesn't offer the opportunities for me to do the things that fulfill me at age 26. But occasionally, it's nice to reconnect with the place that I called home for the first 24 years of my existence. Cosmetically, some aspects of the place are different every time I visit... but the feeling of being in my hometown will never, ever change.
*****N*T*G*****
Never hesitate to comment!
This trip home was not much different as to activity... but the tone of this weekend felt specifically more nostalgic. I couldn't pinpoint a reason for it, but the whole weekend, I felt like I operated under an invisible cloud of wistfulness. I specifically felt it when I woke up Saturday morning.
**********
I was on the way out the door to meet Nowell at our longtime breakfast haunt, Rich's Other Place (his "first" place is Rich's Deli, about two miles down the road). Remembering that I had brought home no CDs, I rummaged through a closet upstairs and found a storehouse of my old tapes, a throwback to a time when my car had only a cassette player and Ben would dub various CDs to tape for me. One of the cases that caught my eye this morning was emblazoned with four letters: GYBE. I snatched it up, said bye to Mom, and ran out the door to her waiting station wagon (my only direct means of conveyance in PA).
The tape was the album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven by Godspeed You Black Emperor (I forego the inclusion of the exclamation point in their name... even they don't know where it belongs). As I drove through my neighborhood toward the familiar Route 202, the music welled up and filled my head with memories of almost every facet of growing up in this area. I couldn't contain them all... I began speaking out loud to myself, as if I were telling a stranger in the passenger seat the stories that were flooding me... "Chris lived down that road for awhile..." "That's where I waited for the bus in elementary school..." "This was always a good 'jump hill' while driving..." I rolled the windows down and kept telling myself little mini-stories about how "that's where [high school girlfriend] and I would park together..."
Nowell and his girlfriend Sadie met me at Rich's, and we shared stories of how our lives had been going over the best breakfast money can buy. I had Sally's Special: two eggs (scrambled, as always), bacon, two pancakes, wheat toast with butter and jelly, decaf coffee and a comically large plastic cup of ice cold water. The three of us talked and laughed, reminiscing on the role this restaurant played in some of our high school TV lab movies. [For those in the know: the Budget Productions DVD is slated to be finished and released sometime before we all turn 50 years old. Please be patient. It will build the anticipation for what is destined to be the greatest DVD ever compiled. At least, to me.] A sort of scary revelation over breakfast was that our server was [high school girlfriend]'s youngest sister, who was about 8 when [high school girlfriend] and I dated.
After breakfast, the rose-tinted day continued with a visit to my lifelong barber, Alex. Alex has been cutting my hair since I had any hair to cut. He used to operate his shop with a man named Nick Tino, whose name was on the door. After Nick decided to retire, another barber named Dave filled the chair, and he recently purchased the shop from Nick and moved it to a new location two doors down Ambler's main drag, Butler Pike. The name and the location of the shop are different, but Alex is still Alex... I barely have to say a word to him about how I want my hair cut. He just knows. He's the best in the business.
On the way back to Mom's house, Godspeed played on. While rounding the bend along Jolly Road, I approached the spot where grill smoke blows across the street. There's a place called Mermaid which hosts family and corporate barbecues, and the fence borders the street. All through the summer, the smell of grilling hot dogs and hamburgers billows over the fence and into the open windows of passing cars. I rolled the windows down, slowed to about 10mph, and breathed in the smell that will always remind me of summer in Blue Bell. Then I drove around the block, turned the radio up and did it again.
**********
I've lived in New York for over two years now, and I really do consider it home. I have a well-established life here that I appreciate every moment I'm alive. But there's something different about calling a place "home" and calling a place a "hometown." I know that I'd be uncomfortable living in Blue Bell at this stage of my life... it just doesn't offer the opportunities for me to do the things that fulfill me at age 26. But occasionally, it's nice to reconnect with the place that I called home for the first 24 years of my existence. Cosmetically, some aspects of the place are different every time I visit... but the feeling of being in my hometown will never, ever change.
*****N*T*G*****
Never hesitate to comment!
posted by JMP at 10:45 AM
3 Comments:
so who was the sever!? And can you can some of that mermaid air and send it to SF immediately?
The "Sever" was Lucy Liu in 2002's "Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever." And I'll see what I can do about canning and shipping the air... we could use some of it here, too. If they can do it in "Spaceballs," it must be possible!
Yo! Thanks, glad NTG can actually be entertaining from time to time. Perhaps I'll continue answering comments in that dickish manner...
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