Hometown

circling to find the center of a space

My last post was four versions of a poem written to the prompt “hometown.”

I mentioned that my weekend post would delve into the writing process of the poem. (I’m someone who likes reading “back story” for songs and poetry—why they were written or what inspired them. If you do not have the same interest, feel free to skip this post. No hard feelings.)

The idea of a “hometown” immediately brought on all kinds of thoughts for me. The thing is, I live in the city where I was born, but in between, I have lived in so many other places.

I don't even remember some of the places where I lived because I was too young for them to be imprinted in a conscious way on my psyche. (While on a recent drive with my mom, I was trying to get straight in my head the places we lived in those early years. I still can’t get it all straight.)

Does this part of one’s history count, that time and those spaces not entirely remembered?

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash

0-2

I was born on a street called Purdue, a north-south avenue on the east side of Fresno, in central California.

Purdue is one of those smaller streets that stretches for half a mile or so and then gets cut off by larger roads or buildings or businesses and then picks up again in a mile or two.

Which “stretch” we lived on, I couldn’t tell you. The house itself, you wouldn’t be able to find now. A few years after we moved away, a little boy (and possibly his brother, too [I can’t remember]) was playing with fire. The story didn’t end well. The house no longer stands.

My parents then moved to Calwa, an unincorporated community also on the southeast of Fresno. Then a jump to Sacramento. My mom would have to remind me whether we were back in Fresno for a short time again, or maybe a couple of locations in Sacramento, before the bigger jump to India. My dim memories of these times are more snapshot than scene.

2-5

In India, we lived in several different cities, in two different states: Pune and the Nagpur, both in the western state of Maharashtra, and then Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. We bounced around within those cities at least a little bit, so living in three cities in India didn’t mean living in three houses.

Here, more memories formed. Scenes and snapshots alike, an early sense of self and of my place in the world.

It was a very big world.

My place in it was very small.

5-10

When I was five, we returned to the States. California. I hope I remember correctly that we stayed with my dad's parents in the Bay Area first. I recall sleeping with two or three sisters in the living room on a pullout couch-bed. It was nighttime and I wasn’t at all tired. It felt like it was supposed to be day.

This was my first remembered experience with jetlag. I recall almost bristling with energy, with that child’s indignation at being told to sleep when everything around was so exciting and new. And what business did the sun have setting out of turn anyway?

After a little while (days? weeks?), we drove down to Los Angeles and spent a few weeks in an apartment there. We walked down the busy streets in L.A. and I was afraid one of us would get shot. I don’t know where that idea had come from—that this big city was so dangerous—especially having just arrived from India. But we made it through that time safely.

We might have spent a short time somewhere else (an apartment?) and then moved once again on the east side of Fresno, renting a three-bedroom on a street called Ezie, about a mile from a north-south stretch of Purdue. I was nearly six and we lived here until I was nearly eleven. The longest I lived anywhere until this home I am now in.

For decades after moving from that house, I kept returning there in dreams. As if some part of me was trying to find some lost thing. One theme in those dreams was seeking treasure. I’d open trinkets and boxes of all kinds standing on shelves and tables—knowing somehow that there was something to be found.

I never found it.

11-15

After that, we lived in Clovis, a city connected to Fresno like Goshen to Egypt. Only the street signs changing from green to brown indicate a different town entirely. I moved away from that home at nearly 15, though my parents lived there for several more years.

It was where I first made books my home: discovering The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R Donaldson, and Star Trek: The Next Generation—the TV show as well as the sci-fi book series at the library—To Kill a Mockingbird and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Little Women.

That was the first 15 years of my life.

It feels weird that I live only a few miles from the place I was born when there are so many other places inside me. Having all those memories, all those spaces and places, made it difficult to distill a poem about one’s hometown.

Circling

So, I started by jotting the first thing that came to mind:

Circle back to center, swim seaward,
muscles burning to find some distant
shore only to be wave-washed back
again to the place where you started.

Photo by Sime Basioli on Unsplash

This had absolutely nothing to do with my hometown, so I tried again:

A cold November day, I drove east across town, dropping my daughter at a friend's house half a mile from my childhood home. But it's not that simple. That house, where my parents found themselves back again, a short drive from the street where I was born …

I stopped writing. Clearly, this wasn't poetry.

I found myself wanting/needing to give history.

If you've studied writing or attended writing workshops, you might have heard the (strong) suggestion from teachers to not write when something is too close to you.

In my first nonfiction writing class, the professor told us we shouldn’t write anything that happened less than a year ago. He didn't put it completely off the table, but he recommended that we avoid it because memories that are too close are difficult to parse, to see clearly, to write about.