Burning River

What I Left Behind, What I Found There

A few years ago I saw a New Yorker cartoon that hit such a chord with me.  It was two fish, swimming in the sea.  The one says to the other, “Even in water, I don’t feel like myself.”  That was something I could relate to.

The whole of my life I have been interested in who we are as individuals and the world at large.  Who belongs?  Who doesn’t?  How much of that is just a creation of our own minds?   Where is our true home?

I was raised in a twin house, in a neighborhood that was predominantly, but not exclusively, Italian-American.   My parents bought the house, in 1957, from the Italian-born Presbyterian minister (yes, they do exist!), Reverend Della Loggia, for eight thousand dollars.   I and my brother and sister were born there.  That house, that neighborhood and the blocks surrounding it which included most of my relatives, the few friends I had, our parish and our school, were my entire life.  The street was like the city in a small town: Bell Telephone, a coal company, a plastics factory, an auto body shop,  an Assemblies of God church,   bicycle shop, a hardware store and many other businesses co-existed with those of us in those twin homes.   My mother did not need to drive us any where or arrange play dates.  The world was right outside our front door; we just needed to open it and step in.

We moved from that home when I was sixteen years old.  It was an event that caused a sort of cleft in my brain.  Never had I identified with a place as much since.  I suspect, at this point, I never will.    I have embarked, over the last few years, on something that I call “excavation”.  I have spent a lot of time, walking around my old neighborhood.  It would take an entire book to explain what that exercise has meant to me and what I have found there.   Last summer I spent some time in my next door neighbor’s house.   Mrs. Z had just passed away and her two daughters, my best friends from childhood kindly allowed me to spend time in the house, alone, to write.  Place is so important to me.  As well, I’d spent half my childhood in that home.  My affection for that family runs deep, as they are inextricably bound with my childhood.  My friend warned “Don’t be surprised—the house is unchanged since we were twelve.”  She was right.  It was like time had stopped.  I roamed around the house, quietly and with great respect —it did not belong to me , after all.   I wanted to write, but managed to weep   a lot over the days I spent there.  I lightly touched objects, the very same, I’d had a fascination with as a child.  It was all preserved.  Even the toys we played with.    The two sisters were readying the house for the new owners.    It would be lost to be forever–my last connection with my old neighborhood.  My own house stood one door away, much like the way we left it, in fact.   It had been lost to me so long ago.  So now I mourned to “homes”.

My stories all, in one way or another, have their genesis in impressions from childhood and “outsider” status.   “Natural Habitat” is a place where we should belong.  But do we?  Many of my stories turn that very notion on its head.  The French philosopher’s Diderot has cautioned “We are where we think we are; neither time nor distance makes any difference.”  Along with writing my stories, it is a dictum that has comforted me more than once.    I have come to think of that old neighborhood as, truly, my natural habitat, where it will remain in my mind, the same as it always was.

~M. Reale