This Is Our Town

Chelsea Rose
Sep 9, 2018 · 5 min read

I came back to The City with skinned knees.

It was the end of August in New York and I wore pants the whole week, despite the fact it was 100 degrees out and the whole island of Manhattan was baking like an inside-out possum on wet asphalt. At 26 years old, I really have no business scabbing up my legs. But that’s what happens when you go home.

Like a true pop punk kid, I wanted nothing more from the ages of 14–18 than to get the Hell out of the only place I’d ever known. It was stiflingly traditional. Weightily religious. Complacently unaware.

But hey, so’s New York. Except the traditions are about cream cheese quantity and the religious choices are less “Lutheran or Catholic” and more “Bronx or Brooklyn.” And if you’ve ever seen a lifelong city dweller catch sight of a deer, you know what I mean about unaware.

It’s been almost a full decade since I first left Painesville, Ohio — a lakeside town wedged 30 miles east of Cleveland and 30 miles west of Can’t-Get-Cell-Service Stix™. At worst, it was the kind of place where guys had Confederate flags waving behind their trucks despite the fact you literally couldn’t get further north without hitting Canada. At best, it was a community full of people who gave a shit about who you were and what you loved. For me, so much of that was tied to music. And being a stone’s throw from the birthplace of rock & roll, I sure found my fair share of it.

It’s not a coincidence a lot of the bands making music I loved in my childhood and teen years came from the Midwest. There’s not a whole lot to do if you’re an unathletic kid in a football-focused culture other than pick up a guitar and write about your feelings. Shit, even I tried it, before I came to accept my natural tone deafness.

At least I was fucking READY with my album cover. Look at this hardass who knows three whole chords.

From Thin Lizzy to Diddy, there’s no shortage of hymns about coming home. Pop punk just happened to really lean into the concept. Music and where we grow up are intrinsically linked. The sentiment and the substance bind with one another — the place you come from influences your stories, and the stories you make are heightened by the music you loved when you made them. It’s the same reason these are my most favorite — and most important — things to share with the people I hold close. I don’t think anything can provide a map for who I am better than playlists and Painesville. My relationships with both, and my appreciation for them, have developed with the complexity of adulthood.

I just spent a whole summer week doing nothing in my hometown for the first time in a long time. I drove around with windows down listening to the lyrics that locked on to my long-term memory over the years riding on those roads. I sang along in a way that would get you looks on the A Train, while still not being the weirdest thing anyone would come across on a typical New York commute.

The last day before I had to fly back to The City and face the endless pit of emails I’d ignored, the bills I had to pay before the end of the week, the apartment I’d naturally failed to clean before I left, I went up to the beach — the most uniquely physical part of life in Northeast Ohio, and the part I have the hardest time describing to people who didn’t grow up with it, with the vastness of an ocean but the stillness of a lullaby. The busted lighthouse on the east end had recently been bought by a private owner, but we still jumped around the boulders leading up to the chipped white building like we’d always done. I ripped my knees climbing up the concrete jetty. Not as nimble as I was as a kid.

I guess Josh gets a guest appearance

Ten years is a long time to be away. The list of things you want to revisit ratchets up as the days you get to spend become fewer and fewer as more of your life exists elsewhere. Every time I’m around — rain or shine, boiling humidity or subzero wind chill — I go up to the beach. I stare at the immense number of stars you can see over the dark water. I breathe in the dull smell of dead fish and wet wood. I pick smoothed glass out of the sand. I probably listen to Everything in Transit at least once in full.

The people who used to be friends fade into acquaintances, then strangers, then memories. The people who stayed friends become more like family than anything else. Songs do the same thing — falling into the fodder of occasionally rediscovered throwback bangers or maintaining a permanent place on the rotation. But my relationship with the physical place changed more than anything else. The things that are new — the repaved roads and recently opened restaurant chains — are fresh and foreign. The things that stayed the same — the beach glass and bonfire smoke — feel bigger than they did back then. It should be the opposite, right? The more of the world I see, the smaller that town should seem. But it doesn’t. I see more in it now — the deeper parts I haven’t found again in Philly or New York or Pittsburgh or Nashville. The parts you have to climb in and discover — skinning your knees along the way.

Here’s a playlist of songs about hometowns — ranging on the “A Day to Remember / Ocala” to “All Time Low / Baltimore” scale of appreciation.

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