Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Sketches of my neighborhood

Right, Tam, first reading the first paragraphs of Jayber Crow (I need a haircut, too, I don't know if you noticed) and seeing how there's two things going on there--the old barber, the place described. And so the mental map, memory map, getting an image in your head, then starting to write about the place where you grew up, however you like.

Of course I've done this many times in the stories I used to write, but I can always start again:

My house is halfway up the hill, below the railroad tracks, above the sewers. My cat used to go sit in the sewers when it was rainy or cold, which I never understood. Why didn't he come in the house, when it was so much more cozy? Next door lived Bubba and Willy with their grandma, sometimes, and they were great at videogames and had lots of X-men lore. On the other side was Roddy, whose wife played Chopin while he sneezed so loud. Around the corner lived Greg and Donald. Greg's house was closer; our moms' gardens were on either side of the chain link fence growing tomatoes, corn, lettuce. Donald had the woods full of sticks and leaves and, we supposed, the occasional hobo from the trains. And beyond that, the neighborhood stretched to Old Town.

Now, to write as if we're anthropologists, historians, sociologists--an outsider, trying to define the same place from a different perspective, colder, analytical, academic:

How quaint, this American suburb from the 2nd half of the 20th century. Full of post-war security, overlaid with cold-war dread, but mostly uncertainty, that characteristic place-less-ness of the latter decades. Complacency, dull complicity in the global system from the comfort of a TV-glow hearth. There are streets lined with single family homes. Initially occupied by the white middle class employed in the suburban businesses or commuting into DC, these gave way beginning in the late 90s to an increasing influx of immigrants from Latin America, small business owners, as part of the transformation of Old Town and of Gaithersburg in general.

(Sorry I post so much. At the moment I just feel I need to move this video down the page so it's not the first thing you see here...)

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