Traveling Extensively in Scituate

I took one of those strange runs around town where the geography of the place becomes, somehow, more apparent.  There were hills and ditches and patches of trees and patches without trees that I’d almost forgotten about because I hadn’t been by in so long.  It’s hard to think that I’d actually left this place for years on end because that life feels so far away now.  It feels like another me.

Thoreau once said, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.”  I’d like to think that I’ve explored this little burg a bit myself, that I’ve been acquainted with its past as well as it’s present.  I saw someone putting up a new house from scratch on Tilden Rd today and thought to myself that it’s hard to believe that anything isn’t prefabricated today.  That things are still built from a mold that is used once and only once.

Kerouac said one of the keys to writing is to, “be in love with yr own life” I think that should transcend the writing game and should apply to everyone.  Sometimes I’ll look back at days gone by and me and want to go back and slap my younger self in the face or put up a road block but as metaphysical as it may sound God did not grant us erasers of past, although I suppose if we were more forgetful beasts I’m sure we’d all forget everything in time.  But I am of a poor disposition that tends to remember far too much of the minutiae of life and therefore when I take a walk a run a jaunt around this merry little burg then I am apt to find myself remembering strange remembrances which apply to this town.  My hometown.

Cue Mr Springsteen:  http://youtu.be/D6XH9R7kMwQ

Yes and this was not my first home nor will it be my last but it is home nonetheless.  I’ve had many places I’ve called home or felt home, either in the company of good people or in the presence of a good place.  I have felt in dreams the kind of solemnity which comes with a feeling of being home.  The smell of it and the taste of it’s cooking are undeniably familiar yet inevitably fabrications of reality, manipulations of some strangeness in the brain that signals the coming on of comfort.  Like even now as I remember a younger me cutting through the path behind the bleachers that leads from Cedarwood to the football field at the high school to play a pickup game of baseball in the quad when I was about 13 which in a funny way reminds me of the walks on the snowmobile trail in Keene to go to the “beach” and going past the A-Fields and now walking through the Public Gardens down Charles St to Cambridge St. to Staniford to the Boston Garden.  It all adds up.

The geography of a place settles on you.  When you are walking you notice the contours of the road, the smell of the neighborhoods and individual driveways.  You notice the sounds of birds and the sight of a woodpecker climbing a tree leading with its beak as you go by or the sounds of people mowing their lawns or talking to friends on front porches.  The conversations of strangers always seems so much more interesting and urgent than anything else in the world.

To go back to the whole Kerouacian point of loving yer own life to segue into another Kerouac quote, “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge.”  Kids, this is the voice of experience.  You always know more than you think you know and you all talk so pretty some times it shatters me to my very core.  If I had a dime for every terrible decision, every impulsive action, every cuss and curr and clash and attack then I would not be the person I am today, the one trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday.  Without a corruptor there is no story.