There’s No Place Like Home

I belong to a cult. A very strange cult. I didn’t even know that I belonged to it until I went to my twentieth high school reunion. I belong to the cult of Hastings-on-Hudson.

Americans aren’t supposed to suffer from place identification. We’re the nation of immigrants, not some shitting shepherds up on the hill. We move to opportunity. Leave the farm for the city, head down the river as soon as we come of age, go West to seek our fortune. There’s no time in a nation of entrepreneurs to get nostalgic for the birthplace. Leave that to the old countries. Europeans may squander their entire life cycle on one town. Australian aborigines may walk in the footsteps of their ancestors. We’re lucky if have two sacraments in the same church.

And if, by some fluke, we become attached to a place, it isn’t supposed to be the suburbs. It may be understandable to pine for the Pacific Ocean or the rolling hills of Virginia, but to have a place in your heart for the suburbs? Well, it’s almost perverse. The suburbs? Those bastions of American mediocraty? The cul-de-sacs of bourgeois safety? Those harbors of white flight? Aren’t those the communities that Cheever summed up with the image of a man opening a Tupperware container full of spoiled meat? Weren’t they discredited when the Junior League crashed against the rocks of alcoholism and lesbian empowerment? Have they not been left for dead save the romanticized lyrics of Bruce Springsteen anthems?

I cannot defend the suburbs. The salmon does not choose his natal stream. I am drawn back to the place of my birth.

And I have found that others share my yearning for that spot on Earth where we came into the world. Their spouses, like mine, cringe when they find themselves on the section of the Saw Mill River Parkway where a hard right may initiate hours of driving through the streets of Hastings. “Let me just show you the pool,” I say. She replies, “I’ve seen the pool”. “What about the ball field in Uniontown? Have I ever taken you to Uniontown?” She’s been to Uniontown, and Hillside woods, and Sugar Pond. She can drink in these sites but does not become poisoned by the Kool-aid.

There are many with much more knowledge and dedication to the town than me. Some of them even made a movie set in Hastings. A very good movie called Last Ball. I saw it years ago at the Northampton film festival. The images of Hastings on the big screen were almost too much for me to bear. Seeing them filled me with the hollowness that reading Tolkien books give you — the desire to slip into a world that does not exist. After watching the movie I knew that my reoccurring dreams of the house I grew up in would increase in intensity and interval. Why the fascination with the lost real estate of a little Hudson River town?

What is it about Hastings that makes me hold it above all other places? A good portion of my childhood was spent in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, which is more beautiful than Hastings. I went to high school in Connecticut, college in Virginia, lived in Boston, Arizona, Montana and New York City. Why Hastings? Why the fascination with Hastings?

It Must be the Place

Hastings is a beautiful town. Its roads, which are graciously lined with sidewalks and stone walls, terrace a set of hills on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Overgrown hardwoods cover each street with a high green canopy. The houses aren’t just dropped in place… they have yards both landscaped and tightly planted. The spring is a riot of flowering bulbs and bushes. The summer is atmospherically verdant and heavy. Cicadas fill the night with waves of pulsing sound, providing a lullaby soundtrack to evening strolls and thereby transforming them into peaceful somnambulant journeys. The fall air is rich with the smell of oak leaves and punctuated by the sound of acorns denting the hoods of parked cars.

It Must be the Time

I grew up in the enchanted days of the middle class. Divorce was ripping through middle America like a revival, but men could still be counted on to waste their weekdays at thankless jobs and their weekends on well trimmed lawns. Each morning commuters marched down the hills to catch the local train to New York. After work they drank in city bars before boarding the 5:45 back to Westchester County. Children were safe to walk to school. Mothers played tennis, volunteered, and thought seriously of going back to work. The institutions of childhood were unchallenged and well attended.

It Must Have Been the Racism

White flight had worked. The only people of color were from middle class families. I can’t answer for what their experience was. There was some economic diversity in those days. An Anaconda Aluminum plant dominated the waterfront, insuring that the village retained its factory town status. Blue collar families could afford to live in town thanks to a hulking maze of superfund buildings wedged between the river and the train tracks.

It Must Have Been the Food

We didn’t eat fast food. There were Greek diners, pizza parlors, and deli’s that sold you wedges. Good Humor patrolled the streets during the summer — inciting children to steal change from their parents. For a dime you got an orange push-up, twenty-five cents fetched an Italian Ice, if you had $1.45 you could get one of the mythic triumvirs; a strawberry shortcake, chocolate eclair, or toasted almond. There was also Carvel a few towns away.

It Must Have Been the People

Aaaaah, we are getting close. I appreciate the politeness of the Southerners. I like the plain talk of the folks out West, but in my heart of hearts the only people I really trust are New Yorkers. I like their pace. I like their tone. I like the level of cynicism and swearing. Ethnicity sometimes matters so little in New York. The guy in the deli… is he Latino, Middle Eastern, or Indian… it doesn’t matter, tell him “bacon, egg and cheese” in one word with volume and say “black” before you say “coffee”. The middle class New York suburbanites I grew up with are the people with whom I am most comfortable. Not overly materialistic or class conscious, they seem as a group to be intellectually curious without being fussy. They are neither jaded nor idealistic. They are forward but not pedantic, polite but not solicitous. They don’t play golf.

It is Nostalgia, Pure and Simple

It is. I am an ex-patriot. I can’t return because economics don’t allow it. The house my parents bought for $30,000 in 1960 now costs $450,000. I wanted to walk my son up the street I took to school. I wanted him to skate on the pond I learned to skate on. I wanted to spend a summer day waving away yellow jackets at the snack bar of the municipal pool.

The Navajos bury part of the belly button near a baby’s home. They believe that the child will return to that spot throughout his life. Somewhere under the flagstones of my childhood home my spirit button must be buried.

But I am like a salmon who, upon returning to the stream of his birth, finds the tributary choked with silt. In violation of nature’s blueprint he cannot birth his young in the place where he was born. He must return to the sea with the smell of home still fresh in his brain.