Retrospective
Enough with my organ recital. I had a nice, but short, visit to my hometown over the weekend. My youngest brother was there also, as he had business in Ohio the next week. We did some chores around the house - Mom lives in the house we built in 1961, when I was in the 7th grade:
It looks pretty lush now, but when we built it, it stood in a sea of barren fill dirt. We couldn’t afford professional landscapers, so I spent a lot of the summer of ‘62 planting grass seed, raking, watering, planting shrubs and trees. It’s satisfying to walk around the place and remember what was going on in my life when various plants went in.
We took a couple of long walks - Mom has always been an avid walker:
We walked down the main street, recalling the ice cream parlors, drug-store soda fountains, bakeries and greasy-spoon eateries that have come and gone in these venerable old buildings:
and past the municipal swimming pool where Mrs. Perils was a hot lifeguard in high school
Walked past the old Junior High. One of the classrooms at the right was my 8th grade science class, where Mr. Willmarth held himself out as a handwriting analyst. About mine, he said, “It shows you’re kind of lazy. There are other things here, but I shouldn’t tell you about those right now.” Since he was right about the lazy part, I was sure he could also read the darker things, too, flaws that I didn’t even know for sure, but suspected. Since the high school building adjoined the Jr. High, and he was maybe 5 years ahead of me, Jimbo Leyland was often the subject of morning announcements and, probably, summonses to the principal’s office.
And, since the previous weekend was Memorial Day, we visited Fort Meigs Cemetery, where 4 generations of us, plus several other family branches, are buried or scattered. There’s a sort of “Our Town” aspect to a stroll through this cemetery for me. I see familiar family names, parents and grandparents of people I was in school with, a sense of generational depth that is lost for many of us in the diaspora that our mobility has afforded us. All four of my generations sacrificed in some way in order to contribute to the richness of life that each of us, as successors, has known, and I am grateful to each of them.
