The Small Town Metropolitan

"There are two ways of getting home...

...and one of them is to stay there." - G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

But I have chosen the other way (it involves walking the whole way round the world until returning to the place where you started) and now I sit at my old desk in my old room amid the ghosts of childhood past.  For the first time in 10 years, I am spending the summer at home.

I have been here less than a week, but it feels longer.  (This is no reflection on my parents' company .  It is rather a tribute to the number of things we have managed to accomplish in the past few days). 

The Small Town seems pretty much as it always was, though I am assured that things have changed. 

My father's health is improving, though still not all one could wish.

We have done a great deal of work on the theatre's summer season, though the number of things we still must do makes my head spin.

No sooner did I accept that he was out of my life for good, than I got a call from The Impossible Man.  We have traded voice mails.  Part of me is happy to hear from him.  Another chunk of me wishes he would leave me alone.

I have just re-read this post and come to the conclusion that, even at the disgracefully early hour of 8pm, I am too tired to blog in any but boring fashion.

More tomorrow...

Sorry...

...for the light posting.  I have had a busy and draining few days.  I will have more to say in the near future, but for now here's what's up:

• My father's health isn't good.  There is no immediate danger (in fact, there is much cause for hope).
• Nevertheless, his health problems have impacted his ability to work, just at the time of year when things start to get busiest for him and my mother.
• Should my father take a turn for the worse, my mother and the family business would be, to use my mother's phrase "totally screwed."  (I love a sweet mother with a dirty mouth).
• Therefore ,I will be heading home to the Small Town to spend the summer helping out with the theatre.  This will include directing at least one show.  It will also include lots of other things TBD.
• I am leaving LA in less than three weeks.
• I made a list of everything I have to do before I leave.
• I ran from the room screaming in horror.
• I recovered.
• I am now slogging through the list.
• There will be more later....

There and Back Again

I have returned from my trip home to see my parents. It was lovely and happy and sad and easy and hard and all the things I knew it would be. Now I am back in LA in the small apartment with the damp floors. A moldy place, but mine own. I am so tired my head feels heavy - like it might drop off my shoulders. I am taking to my bed at a wildly self-indulgent hour. I will return soon.

I Will Arise?

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

- The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William Butler Yeats

I have been in one of those moods lately.  One of those moods in which I yearn for home and I think that I will chuck it all here in LA (not that I have much to chuck, to be perfectly honest) and pack up the little Ford and start driving East and not stop till I see the Pittsburgh skyline.  (Of course, knowing the little Ford, I would probably have to stop for extensive repairs before I hit Albuquerque).

I blame it mostly on the weather.  There is something so mournful about autumn, even autumn in LA when it can still be 70 and sunny six days out of seven.  The nights are getting cold now and the winds are alternately damp from the ocean and dry from the mountains.  I like the LA autumn, but I miss the PA one.  I miss great mounds of leaves piled about my feet.  I miss damp earth and frost in the mornings and roadside apple cider stands.  I miss watching football with my father.  Sure, we're off to a lousy start.  But that will only make the comeback sweeter.  Or we could always have heartbreak and glorious plans for next year. 

And I'm tired.  I'm working long hours and dog sitting on the side.  I don't have as much time to write as I'd like.  And even when I have the time, I don't seem to have the words.  Not lately.  And so I sit in traffic, which seems to get worse every day and I think about home.

I know that much of this is just plain old "grass is always greener-ism."  I only think about the good things that would/could happen if I went home.  I don't think about the LA things I would miss.  I don't think about the regrets I might come to have.  I don't think about snow still falling in March.

I almost left this summer.  I had purchased my plane ticket and made my plans.  And then my present job fell out of the sky and hit me on the head and I really had no choice but to give it a shot.  And I'm glad I did.  I like the job, and it could lead to better things, and there are thousands of people in this town who would give anything to be in my shoes, small cog though I am. 

But still I think.  I think about how nice it might be to "give up."  To give up the striving and the struggling and the starving and the hoping of this business in this town.  To go home and live more simply and give up a few of the dreams and have a more settled life.  Of course, the sort of things I'd try to do if I did go back are not without their own struggles.  And I may do it.  I may do it soon.

But not quite yet. 

Elegy for Rolling Rock: Bottle III

I must confess I don't remember much of Bottle III.  I drank it while making some Gazpacho last week.  In my attempt to battle the heat wave, I had gone on a cold soup kick.

I do remember thinking about the Mexican restaurant in my hometown.  It is called Cozumel and it is run by actual Mexicans.  From Mexico.  I mention this, because some people in Los Angeles are surprised to learn that small towns actually have restaurants other than the Homestyle Buffet.  (I ain't knocking the Buffet, don't misunderstand me). 

Anyway, I guess I thought about Cozumel, and the waiter there who used to flirt with me, and how much better their Gazpacho is than the stuff I was making.

Of Coward and Coffee

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is

- Noel Coward

Years ago my father directed a play about the relationship between Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence.  One day I was running lines with the actor who played Coward and when he came to the quote above he paused, turned to me and said, "Isn't that so true?" 

And it is, at least for me.  I find that the songs that speak to me most personally, that conjure up the most powerful memories, that take me out of one time and place and transport me to another, that fill me with nostalgia or love or hope, are (nine times out of ten) not the sort of songs experts would consider powerful (or even good).

I must tell you sometime about how I can be moved to tears by Locomotion, (because it was the brand new song at my father's last high school dance), or Octopus's Garden (because I associate it with a brave friend who died too young).

Do you know what else is oddly powerful and evocative: the sense of smell.  Once, during the summer of 2003, when I was unable to make my customary visit home to the theatre, I walked past a furniture shop's loading dock, where workmen were sanding and painting some wooden chairs.  The attendant smells (sawdust and paint) are those I associate with the building of sets, and thus with my childhood summers.  Before I had time to realize what my mind was doing, I had burst into tears, overcome with nostalgia and a longing for home.  (I had also attracted the stares of the workmen, but never mind).

Today at work I was cleaning a coffee pot that had been left too long on the warmer.  The acrid smell of overdone coffee is not a pleasant one, but it is one that I associate with a particular friend of mine.  He was a giant of my youth - a grandfather, favorite uncle, and friend all rolled into one.  He made my childhood possible.  But today he is a tragic figure.  I mean that in the strictest sense: he is "a great and good man brought down by a flaw in his character."  He is not what he once was.  Most days I feel nothing but anger for him; he has brought great pain to the people I love the best.

But today I was cleaning the coffee pot, and for just a moment I thought of things as they used to be.  And I missed him and loved him and was grateful to him.  It was a moment of grace on a bitter day.

Because of burnt coffee.  Go figure.

It Was Nice While It Lasted

Last bottles of Rolling Rock made in Latrobe.

Elegy for Rolling Rock: Bottle II

Bottle Two I drank last night while making some cold avocado soup. I underestimated the speed with which I could make the soup or overestimated my energy or both. I thought that I'd have the soup ready before I finished the beer. I was wrong. So I drank the beer on an empty stomach and by the time I did sit down to the soup, I was giddy and happy and not thinking about much of anything.

I'd had a nice conversation with my sister after work and so my thoughts, such as they were, tended toward her and I wished, not for the first time, that LA and my hometown were just a little bit closer. Or that someone would hurry up and invent a teleportation device.

Elegy for Rolling Rock: Bottle I

As you may know, I am mourning the loss of my Hometown Beer.  I will not be able to drink it after August 1st, when it will no longer be brewed in Latrobe.  So I have purchased my last six pack and will be drinking it over the next few days.  I thought that I would keep a record of the circumstances under which I consume each bottle and the thoughts and feelings each inspires.  This is probably of interest to no one but me.

I drank the first bottle on Saturday afternoon.  The power had been off for a few hours and I was beginning to fear that it wouldn't be a quick fix.  Luckily the beer had gotten cool before the fridge had gotten hot. 

The air felt sticky (like home, not LA) and I found myself wondering if it would cool off at night.  See, at home, the moisture in the air holds the heat and summer nights feel much like summer days.  In normally dry LA, however, a scorching day can be followed by a blissfully cool night.

But I thought about the sticky nights at home, and sitting at the Cabaret after the show and drinking Rolling Rock slowly from a big glass stein, and listening to the actors tell stories.  And I thought about one actor in particular with whom I had fancied myself madly in love and of how I used to glow when he would refill my glass of beer without being asked.

I also thought about how strange the sky looked - I mean on Saturday, in LA.  It was a kind of sickly orange and yellow and gray-green.  If I'd been at home, I'd have been worried that a tornado was coming.  So I thought about one particular tornado warning in my childhood, when my mother and sister and I took refuge in the basement.  And my sister was so excited that she couldn't stop running around in circles.  She kept setting off the mousetraps by accident.  My mother was worried that she'd get caught in one of them, so Mom and I set the rest of them off with a broomstick and my sister could keep running and not get hurt.

Better Late Etc.

Because "there's always hope," says Newman Noggs.

Not one quasi-official Save Rolling Rock site.  But two.

You can sign this petition.  Or you can sign this one.  Or both.

Because God forbid Latrobeans should ever co-ordinate anything except the annual 4th of July celebration.  (I speak with love).