This has proven one of the hardest segments to write. I've been avoiding it for several days, hoping it'll go away -- it hasn't, of course. While I could skip over Cleveland and pick things up at Groa's house in western Pennsylvania, that wouldn't be true to the idea of a travelogue, or to myself. However, there's the other problem that nothing much really happened that would be interesting: I caught up on sleep, ate, and spent time with my mother.
No, the interesting parts, at least to me, are my reactions to what had gone on in my absence from Cleveland, my home town. There's a scene in Stephen King's It where the main protagonist comes back to his hometown after having been several years absent: the town has grown from a small cluster of residences surrounded by farms to a small city with a mall where the old Ironworks used to be. In the fifties and early sixties, there had been the great movie-palaces of old, and now there were banks. His eye was dragged, the author wrote, to try and fit the old buildings where the new ones were, superimposing them like ghosts.
I knew exactly what King meant. It hit me every time I came home to my mother's, but I hadn't been alone in Cleveland for an extended period of time to really let it sink in -- momentary shocks were all I had had while showing Mike around.
It was different this time. This entry, also, is different from the others, but possibly more interesting than a mere catalogue of what was for dinner every night.
First, meet my mother, Patricia Anne Harris, née Dean, she got Wood from my dad, but changed when she married my stepfather. She's fifty-two, currently employed as a data-entry clerk at an insurance firm in downtown Cleveland:
She and my father married a few years before I was born. Her own father, my grandfather, died when my mother was ten, while (successfully) saving one of her brothers, my uncle, from drowning -- making my maternal grandmother a single mother long before it was socially acceptable. My grandmother became a nurse, and eventually moved to Florida and retired. If you have heard me speak about my grandmother, this isn't the one I speak about; it shames me that I've drifted apart from her, and the longer you do that, the harder it is to re-establish ties. She lived hard, and was as gentle as she could be to her grandchildren, but the harshness and recognition that Life Was Hard remained, whatever she did.
Matrilineally, I'm a fifth-generation Clevelander. It's not that I don't love California -- I think by the end of this we'll have pretty conclusively worked it out that it's where I am and I'm happy there -- but I also love this unpretty little city by the lake. The tug is strong enough that occasionally I flirt with the idea of having at least my firstborn child there, should I ever have children, -- just fly out for the birth and a modicum of postpartum, then fly home. Okay, so I come back to my senses right after, but I flirt with the idea. The other women of my line are buried in a cemetery on the East Side, somewhere, but my mother can't tell me where, she can only show me, and even this weekend somehow she didn't make the time.
I was born at St. John's Hospital on Cleveland's West Side, which has since been closed and torn down. After a couple years sharing a duplex with my uncle, aunt, and cousin, we moved here, a house on the eastern edge of Cleveland's West Park neighborhood:
But we only used the front door on holidays, for sitting out on the steps, or if we were keeping bicycles in the screened-in porch. Anything normal and informal went around to the side door:
After a couple steps up, there was the kitchen. My stepfather, Rick, has been remodeling and renovating the place, one room at a time. This room is 'supposed' to be cheerful yellow, with the cabinet handles in silver chrome. A behemoth of a refrigerator loomed, cocoa-brown, in a bit of space between the side door entry and the dining room doorway.
My mother asked me not to take any more pictures of the inside of the house after that, or I'd've taken one of my former bedroom, also.
Going to a public school in Cleveland is foolhardy to say the least. I have only heard the vaguest rumors about what religion was selected for we children after my Roman Catholic mother married my Southern Baptist father (both fairly lapsed), but the only private school choice in that part of town was the local Catholic parish, Saints Philip and James, so we were raised Catholic and went there.
I was bright, but not socially ept, and my mother kept me from most sports and after-school activities besides the "teacher's pet" track. When my parents' marriage fell apart, the Eastman Branch of the Cleveland Public Library, about a half-mile away, was a safe refuge. After one year at Saint Augustine's, an all-girls Catholic high school about five miles away from the house in the inner-ring suburb of Lakewood, I left my mother's house to move in with my father, who'd fled to a suburb of the next ring out, with a good school: Rocky River. We lived in a three-bedroom apartment there for some time, juggling schoolwork with my stepmother's drinking problem and attendant revolving-door trips through AA and rehab, peppered with visitations by my stepsiblings, of whom the less that's said, the better.
I was in poor shape the winter of my sophomore year, got sense knocked into me with the coming of the spring, graduated fourth in a class of one hundred fifty-one, and after one year at a prestiigous local engineering university, dropped out of college to move to New York City and in with a man I'd met over the Internet. Mike and I moved to California a year and a half after that, but so much of me is still tied up in this, one of the buckles of the Rust Belt.
It was only after moving far away from all this that I gained perspective enough to appreciate it.
There is one bit of 'dinners I had' that I should probably include, this from Saturday:
My mother, stepfather, and I went shopping for quite a few things over these days, as Rick was about to head off on his own epic journey early Monday morning. Every time we went out for dinner, which was for all meals but the corned beef and cabbage my mother prepared in the slow cooker for Sunday dinner, I paid. Saturday for lunch, we took the train to the east side of town, to the university where I'd gone for a year, and took a brief sojourn into Little Italy to have some homemade pasta at Mama Santa's -- a pilgrimage I try to make every time I'm in Cleveland. The restaurant, on Mayfield near Euclid, specializes in Sicilian food and hasn't been redecorated since some time before my year of college, and stepping inside you can well believe the stories about it having been a hotbed of Mafia intrigue. But the sauce is thick, and the homemade noodles have the best texture of any pasta I've ever eaten, coupled with a slightly nutty taste. They make their meatballs by machine, though, evidenced by the too-smooth texture.
On Sunday night, after dinner, I told Mother I was off to Malley's Chocolates, the local manufacturer of cocoa confectionery, for a hot fudge sundae (a couple of their stores have soda shops or ice cream parlors). It had the singular charm of being true, but I primarily wanted to give them time alone before I left.
At Malley's, they always serve bowls of pretzels at the counter, and the hot fudge sauce is always served separately from the ice cream, in its own little pitcher, that one might pour it on one's ice cream a little at a time, and neither cool the hot fudge nor melt the ice cream before necessary. Besides, you can dip the salty pretzels in the hot fudge sauce, which is nearly as tasty as applying the sauce to the ice cream. I nipped into the shop just before closing, and charmed the high school counterboy utterly with tales of faraway exotic places, like California.
It brought home what travel, just being around even if you don't necessarily have hair-raising adventures, does for you.
Another story touched, time to move on -- well, after purchasing a couple jars of fudge sauce (I promised one to Mum so she could have her own sundae later) and a box of chocolate-covered pretzels. I nipped briefly into Rocky River, as upper-middle-class suburbs are more likely to carry exotic toothpaste brands like Tom's of Maine, and drove to Bradstreet's Landing.
Bradstreet's Landing isn't much to look at: a park with scattered picnic tables and parking spaces, covering the five hundred feet or so between Lake Road and Lake Erie, with a brief fishing pier extending past, into the lake itself. When we lived in Rocky River, my father, stepmother, brothers, and I would frequently come here and catch fish -- when it was edible, it was catfish, and yes, eating bottom-feeding fish from a lake whose most notable tributary once was so polluted as to actually catch on fire certainly Explains a Lot about Lorrie, ha ha ha.
Mostly, I wondered if the lake was still frozen, or if the ice had parted for the year. Lake Erie does not freeze quietly: there's no question of ice skating, and only someone well-experienced hiking rough terrain would dare ice fishing. Rather, at least on this stretch of shore, it freezes in great mounds and crevasses, the waves captured and made solid as they lash the shore in winter's storms. All that had passed by now, the middle of March, and clear, cold water lapped the stone-littered sand at my feet. A pair of geese made quitely chatted with each other as I glanced to the mouth of the creek whose mouth provided the reason for the park, then quietly paid my respects to all of these, the Lake especially, whose waters had nurtured my growing years, and drove back to my mother's house.
Monday, where I actually drove to Groa's, deserves its own segment, away from all this maudlin gunk. The rest of this segment's words and pictures, which belong here as they're of a piece with the above, were actually taken Tuesday, while I was on my way back from Groa's house in western Pennsylvania and towards Lissa's in Detroit, Michigan.
I visited the old Eastman library, where I'd spent countless hours reading, volunteering, and doing amusing things that the card catalog terminals were never designed to accomodate. I met one of the librarians who'd been there when I was actively in that neighborhood.
You know, these bookshelves were all taller when I was younger. I ensured I didn't still have the bad karma of overdue fines over my head, and drove to my old grade school, quite nearby.
Here is my first problem, when I came back and tried to make sense of the changes: the local church is supposed to be the beating heart of a local Catholic community: they gather for church on Sunday, yes, but the kids are there five days a week, there's bingo, there are school and church parties, pageants, PTA meetings; properly, it's a social center.
I knew something was wrong when I went around back, and the parking lot was full of cars. It could never have been full of cars when I or my brothers went there; the parking lot was our playground. I cautiously tried the church's doors, all except the one to the parking lot, one by one.
They were all locked! Locked! Understand, in a living parish, it's unconscionable for the doors to the nave to be locked during the day. At all times, it should be open for parishoners to come in and pray, have their confessions heard, for the schoolchildren to have or practice for Masses. At night, perhaps, especially in that neighborhood, whilch while not the worst wasn't the safest -- yes, that's reasonable.
The doors were locked. I had trouble believing it. I tried one of the side doors, the main front doors, and came around to the front of the school part of the building, and peered up.
I looked at the windows. In an average elementary school, yes, you can see through them, but they're covered in colorful displays, or maybe painted. The rooms inside will be brightly lit, and there's movement.
These were dead. There was only one conclusion to all of this, and mentally I was reeling in shock: this couldn't be! They couldn't've... well, one way to find out. I went back around to the back, and found one open door -- the back door that opened onto church, school, and church hall.
The church door had had a top paneled window, permitting a rippled view of the candles behind. More often, though, it was merely thrown open so one could pass the holy water founts and thus into the nave beyond.
This... this door was plastic over steel, and locked solid. I saw an older couple come up the stairs, and heard a mature voice speak a few syllables. I took the couple steps across the vestibule to the top of the church stairs and listened harder.
"I-thirty!"
Bingo?! On a school day? But we have gym there, you can't be all having bingo there... the pit of my stomach, which had been whirling, fell away. I feared what I'd find at the top of the half-flight of stairs that led to the first floor of the school, which had held the lower grades, but I had to look: I climbed, opened the swinging fire door, and craned my head into the hallway.
This didn't used to have any sodding carpet. Black and brown eight inch square tiles, laid in a checkerboard pattern. That was my school, what's this... carpet? The walls, formerly green (the school colors were green and white) were now white with a brown stripe. The bathroom door across from me, which should say 'Girls' above it, was now blank, a cipher. Then my eyes dragged themselves down the hall to where the first classrooms were, where a sign should have said some teacher's name, a Mrs So-and-So, a Sister Something...
I.B.E.W. Local 209
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers probably wasn't working on spelling drills. I closed the door to the first floor hallway heavily, forgetting to be careful in my shock as I leaned against the door for a long moment. This isn't how it's supposed to be!
Heart heavy and mind reeling, I slowly walked out the back door, around the church, and back to the rental car. A sign I passed on the way out informed what few parishoners who were left that weekday Masses would be held in the rectory basement.
This was no longer the social heart of a small, working-class Catholic community. It was dead... and hadn't had the good grace to accept that and fall over yet. I was dazed all the way back to my mother's house.
Here's another Stephen King ten-cent aphorism for you: The world has moved on. He uses it all through the Dark Tower series, set primarily in a world that's moved on enough to make the minor shifts I've seen here look like two consecutive movie frames. Once I saw what had happened to the school, I felt compelled to rush to other places and snap pictures quick, before they fell away from under me, too.
I drove to Rocky River, the affluent mostly-white suburb where I'd spent my last three years of high school. It wasn't the building which drew me so much as the idea that I might see one of the teachers I'd known and loved so dearly when I was a student here, eight years ago. One of these, my French teacher, likely saved my life, and it was her I most wanted to see, although a couple of the others would have been nice.
It was three fifteen when I pulled into the faculty lot, and I watched the last students trickle from the building, feeling a bit like Hazel, the main chracter of
This is incredibly maudlin for someone who hasn't had their tenth high school reunion yet, but I was Having a Moment, as Laurel would say.
The fact that students were still leaving the building in ones and twos meant that school had but recently let out for the day, something which I confirmed with a long-haired fat girl in glasses on my way in. "Actually," she declared in a nasal voice, "school is over at three oh eight."I didn't let it show, but the mental double-take would've been pictureworthy if I had. Was I that bloody annoying before I realized social skills were a good idea and learned some? No wonder I had no friends but teachers and wanted to pitch myself off a bridge. Yeesh.
The world has moved on: I rambled down the hall, making mental lists of what was the same and what was different, full of trivial things, and I was approached every few dozen feet by a staff member asking if I needed anything.
The first time, I smiled, and explained I was just an alumna, Class of Ninety-Two, looking around the old place. Twice was coincidence, I smiled sunnily and repeated it. The third different person got the spiel, but as it was now confirmed enemy action, I added with equal cheerfullness and assurance that I was neither a drug dealer nor out to blow up the school. One of the teachers actually wondered if I was looking for anyone, which brought me out of reverie long enough to use her as a lookup device.
She started by apologizing for the challenges, but it was policy... sadly, not an unreasonable one here-and-now, and then I gave names. Nope, all gone -- the two I'd cared about most resigned the same year -- just last year, which itself would have been several years after the pair were due for retirement. Mister Duke, who kindled my interest in American History, was off working for the Cleveland Film Institute, and Mrs Mihocik, my French teacher, hopped back and forth between her two condominiums: one here, one in Florida. Vaguely shell-shocked again, I thanked her and drifted into the library.
Libraries are the refuge of the shy and bookish, and have been since time out of mind. This one served double duty: I was here always during study hall, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's tales of Barsoom after having been tipped to them by Heinlein in The Number of the Beast, and, when an unfortunate incident caused me to be banned from the school's computer lab, I fled here to poke at the library's PC instead of the lab's Macintoshes, and convinced that poor thing to dial bulletin board systems it'd never been meant to access.
The librarians were still here, and the one working the main desk, at least, still remembered me -- okay, she got my name wrong, but she was close (Wolf instead of Wood) and remembered unprompted that I'd gone on to Case Western Reserve University with intent to major in biomedical engineering. No mean feat, given the number of students she sees in a year, compounded by four, further compounded by the fact it'd been eight years since I'd darkened her desktop. I briefly caught her up, but unfortunately, it had to be brief -- it was a good three hours to Detroit, and I had a rental car to return.
One more stop, though, one Last Thing before I made tracks for Michigan: Columbia Park. It's another place where a creek tumbles into the Lake, although it's not a flat place. It's also rather hidden, tucked along Lake Road where Columbia Road ends with no signs visible while driving along Lake. The only parking is to use the lot of the Presbyterian church across the street, then dodge traffic under the questionable protection of a blinking light and enter the park proper.
It's flat at the entrance and usually muddy, scattered with a few picnic tables.
Even before you can hear the lake's surf, you can hear the creek just west, tumbling down its last passage before the dramatic end.
Here there are no quiet beaches and tranquil creek-mouths: this bit of shore is all tall cliffs with few beaches to be found. This young waterway has not yet cut its way down totally through the soft shale, and so its last couple dozen feet are obliged to be vertical.
Paralleling its headlong course are a set of cast concrete stairs, coming to a couple landings before... well, that's another change: the steps used to simply stop a meter or so above the restless surf, their bottom edge worn ragged by the countless fierce storms Erie can whip up.
Lately, Bay Village has re-completed the task and now the stairs end as stairs usually should: all the way to the narrow strand of beach, making the route to view the little creek's waterfall far less precipitious.
Here's the falls that that little creek made.
It's one of my favorite places in Cleveland, surpassed by a certain bit of forest at a Girl Scout camp, some thirty miles distant, closed for the season, and certainly not full-gowned in emerald glory, as it always is when I remember it. I didn't visit that this trip, I was already so late, and so it was with this final bit of reverie that I drove back to the freeway and turned my back on Cleveland, setting my steps on the road that would bring me back to my real home, now, in Berkeley. It was three hours' drive to Detroit, and I was done looking backward. Time to move forward.
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