I spent my childhood in a close-knit, working-class, Catholic, white ethnic neighborhood in NYC. All the kids in my kindergarten class lived within 6 blocks or so of my house. My mom knew all their parents, because she went to school with them from kindergarten up through high school. Same with my grandma and great aunts---they knew all my mom's friends because they, too, went to school with their parents-- in the same circa 1920s, multi-story, castle-like brick buildings--in elementary school, junior high school, high school, etc...
The opportunities I had in Arizona were amazing. Smaller classes, friendlier people. More optimisim and less pessimism about one's class and position. If I had told people in "the old neighborhood" that I had wanted to be a lawyer, they would have mocked me. They never knew any lawyers and when I made trips back east to visit family for the holidays, they scolded me for my newfound uppity ambitions. The West was different. The classes mingled in school. Things were more subdued, more laid back. The working and middle classes dressed very much alike and interacted much more. There was less socio-economic segregation. And as a result, I think, poor kids had more opportunity to interact with wealthier kids and see a new kind of life, a better kind of life. It gave us the opportunity to dream of something better. It was in the Sunbelt that I first learned who I was and what I wanted to be, watching the crimson orange and purple sunsets in the hazy summer skies, I first learned how to dream and fell in love with the romantic aspirations of a promising future that such daydreaming--fueled by books and teachers' encouragement--created. I would not be who I am today, had I not lived in the Sunbelt, and been a part of the Culture of Optimism that is so inherently unique to the American West.
Although the Frontier is dead, the American West is still wide open in terms of the mindset it cultivates among those who reside there. The sky is the limit. Anything is possible. The desert is the perfect place to dream. Especially when you're living in a neighborhood filled with cheery, clean-cut Mormons, who did everything they possibly could to make you feel welcome (but at the same time distant, if you didn't join the local church). Regardless, the local Mormon neighborhood I lived in was one of the most supportive and nurturing environments I had ever encountered. To this day, I think I was saved by growing up in the stable, tranquil suburban haven that they provided me.
While my friends in the "old neighborhood" were locking their doors at night and shuddering in fear at the prospect of going into the concrete-covered and broken-glass strewn corner park after dusk, the local grass-covered and palm tree-lined park by my house was active until the late hours of the evening, filled with local Mormon and Mexican families playing sports and having BBQs. Unlike the ethnically balkanized neighborhoods of NYC in the 1980s, where every group was at eachothers' throats, just waiting for a provocation or an excuse to commit violence against "the other," it seemed like almost everybody in my area of the southwest got along. Although I came from a single parent family, my pals' families, Mexican and Mormon alike, accepted me with open arms and they embraced me and brought me along on numerous family outings, many of them into the wilderness, where I learned how to fish, shoot guns, play soccer and go camping. I also developed an insatiable love for homemade hot tamales.
And yet, something was irreperably lost. A part of myself is missing. I have come far in my life, yet I feel an aching absence, a longing, a homesickness for my old neighborhood that saddens me even when I visit my old haunts and family gathering places. I can't help but feel that a part of my youth was robbed from me, that I "should've" grown up with all my childhood friends from kindergarten and elementary school. That I should've finished Junior High School with them, gone on to high school with them. That I should have stayed in the old neighborhood and been a part of that old fabric, the same fabric that comprised my parents and grandparents. By moving to the southwest, something new was made, but something old, valued and cherished was also taken away from me. And no matter how much I try to grab ahold of it, to grasp at memories and dreams of what "might have been," I feel like I am reaching for ghosts, for phantoms. One side of me tells me to move on. Another tells me to reconcile with the past, and yet I do not know how. So many memories in the old neighborhood, but they are memories without closure. Memories of my dead grandmother and grandfather, memories of my father who has passed on. Memories of a hard and difficult youth that I have transcended but which, in many ways, I wish I had transcended while living in the "old neighborhood."
In a way, moving to the Sunbelt feels, for me, like it was "cheating." I can't describe it. So many friends I was great friends with, but I never had the chance to develop those friendships into something more meaningful. In the Sunbelt, all the friendships are superficial and transient, like the people. Throughout high school, people would move into my town and out of my town, year after year. It was hard to make consistent, steady friends. The old neighborhood was different. You were friends with people for life. From kindergarten until death. I missed that boat. And I feel cheated. And yet I feel blessed to have missed out on other things.
My first girlfriend was named Melissa and I "dated" her in kindergarten, where I kissed her on the cheek and first grade, where I kissed her on the lips---risky business for a young man, indeed. We were great pals throughout elementary school and spent all of our time with eachother, playing tag, ringoleevio, hopscotch, tetherball and the like. Unlike other girls, Melissa would even discuss GIJOEs and Transformers with me, not just the cartoons, but the action figures as well, which made her very important and awesome in my book. I couldn't get enough of her. One of my earliest memories is of her kissing me on the cheek, behind a "trapper keeper," in our elementary school cafeteria. Another cherished early memory is of her calling me on the phone for homework when she was out of school for a few days when her grandma died. I cheered her up and made her laugh and this made me feel good. She gave me a hug the next day. Melissa and I were very close in elementary school, but we drifted apart during Junior High School, right before I moved away to the sunbelt.
When I graduated from college, I had tried repeatedly to find her through friends in the old neighborhood. They said she was involved with bad groups of people, using drugs and the like. She was such a sweet, innocent and intelligent girl when I knew her. I felt betrayed in a way, I can't describe it. Its as if life had corrupted the purity of the memories that I had of her. It was as if a knife had stabbed me in the heart. I had idealized my childhood in the old neighborhood so much, that when I came face to face with the reality of that which I had escaped, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Three years ago I discovered, by way of Facebook, that Melissa died of a heroin overdose in her late 20s. I was heartbroken. I even cried a bit. I don't know why. So many from my old neighborhood had become addicted to heroin and a fair number had died from it. My own father had died from AIDS, brought on from his many years of heroin abuse. Perhaps learning of her death, in a way, illustrated for me the possible life I had avoided, by leaving the urban northeast, a move that enabled me to escape the destiny of my own father? I don't know.
In the middle of college, I came back east and fell in love. I attended law school in the east, was married here and now live here, along with most of my family, which has now moved back and is scattered among urban and rural areas of Pennsylvania. Our restless moving and lack of a "life anchor" has had an impact on us all. My sister is desperately searching for a "Rock of Gibralter" in her life, something stable and permanent, something absolute, a quest that has taken many forms.
As for me, I guess I'm just looking for understanding. Moving to Arizona saved me, I suppose, from many of the travails that plagued my father and classmates in the old neighborhood, the burden of dealing with potential criminal and gang relations, drug abuse, broken hearts and unrequitted dreams amidst a landscape of shattered working class insolvency.
And yet, I still can't help but feel that I lost something by leaving this all behind. That even the pain I escaped was something I was "meant" to have experienced and endured, that perhaps I have cheated life and "gotten off too easy."
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Ted Frier
Tom Degan
pob2006
500words
john guzlowski
Bob Simpson
Salon.com
Comments
Go forward. Look back briefly, if you must, but never try to go back.
Your path lies elsewhere.
.
I left the old neighborhood in Brooklyn when I joined the Army in 1963 and I never went back except to visit those left behind. I still have a hole in my heart for days gathering at grandma's and going to PS 187 with the same friends for years.
R
R
We shared a common experience, growing up in New York City while New York was collapsing under the distorting influences of well-meant but ultimately destructive social legislation....but this isn't about politics. It's about emotions.
I was born in Brownsville, probably the toughest neighborhood in all of New York. We moved to Flatbush, to a housing development called Vandeveer and from there we moved on to Little Neck in Queens and, in each case, the move was triggered by influxes of "others" into our neighborhoods.
They called it White Flight.
Here's where our experiences differed. The Catholic neighborhood in New York, pulled inward, attempting to protect their turf against the incursions by others. The Jewish communities picked themselves up, en masse, and moved, together, to the suburbs, so that the same people my parents grew up with now lived around us in the same suburban environment.
Later, these same people, now senior citizens, moved again to the same sections of Florida.
The great difference between the Catholic and Jewish communities was that Catholic families had much stronger allegiances to their parishes than Jews had to their synagogues, in part because there was a great conversion going on, from the orthodoxy of the grandparents to the conservative and liberal flavors of Judaism.
It was much easier to move from an orthodox congregation to a conservative congregation if you were also moving from the depths of Brooklyn to the edges of Queens, where there were - then - no orthodox congregations.
Survivor's guilt.
In each person's life, there are key people with whom we form life-long associations, even if we never see them again once we are parted by circumstances beyond their control. Nevertheless, whatever happens to them also happens to us. We feel their losses as though they were our own, and we revel in their successes in the same manner.
Whenever we hear that someone we were close to in childhood has died, we feel the loss. If we discover that they came to a bad end, we feel guilty, as though we might have somehow averted that fate had we been there.
We cannot. We are actors, not playwrights or directors. We're not in charge of our lives. Chance, not intention, guides our every step in life....although we like to think that we are in charge of our destinies, our destinies are really in charge of us., and destiny is a composite of chance and circumstance.
I see that KS has also started his comment with the same observation about survivor's guilt.
There are two main components of survivor's guilt. One is the unfounded belief that someone you don't deserve the life you've had because the kids you grew up with didn't get the same chances you got.....but this is the effect of a pronounced inferiority complex, which was obviously triggered by your family's descent into reduced circumstances. As a person who has had some success in life, you also feels that you have the ability to change the circumstances of other people to better their lives. Lawyers sometimes do that...but I did say sometimes. This, paradoxically, adds an element of superiority complex to your inferiority, the belief that you can make a difference.
Hold onto that. It's a good belief to have and, sometimes, it's even true. You can make a difference.
One of my personal idols - Robert Heinlein - spent much of his life doing good deeds for other people, helping them in different ways and whenever someone tried to thank him, and offer to repay the debt, he always said, "Don't pay me back. Pay it forward. Help someone else when the chance occurs for you to do so." (Yes, it was Heinlein who coined that term. He should have copyrighted it.)
You can't go home again, because home isn't a place. It's a time, and time comes and goes. People come and go. We come and go.
Life goes on.
Lezlie
Our parents were to quick to run and they were failed by their church's, synagogues, and local leadership. They should have been encouraged by these institutions to stand their ground and fight for what was theirs instead they were encouraged to run and people like Abraham Levitt & sons along with Robert Moses made fortunes building their artificial sanctuary's but that’s just one more indictment of capitalism. If you go back to those very same Brooklyn neighborhoods that were once overrun by criminals and drugs you will see that they are now far safer than they were 40 or 50 years ago. That is because the eastern European Jews that now reside in them did not run from their communal responsibilities this is the advantage of a people who hold fast in their belief in their God and his righteousness,. They are immune to the degeneracy of atheism and all the sorrow that accompanies this deadly affliction of the soul. This is also why you (and I) are attracted to the Christian and Mormon community's of the southwest. When I am fully recovered I shall be moving there myself with as much of my entourage as I can, and it is there we will make our stand.
I do agree with the survivors guilt theory -- I have my own, every time my best friend cries about being a divorced single mother, when I am so luckily happily married.
I never miss my old Catholic neighborhood. I guess that writing those posts a while back about my own life didn't help. It makes one remember all the old flaws--provincialism, plain stupidity--and then you remind yourself that that definitely is not what you want.
You want something much worse, and so do I.
So what is this?
I also moved away from the town where I grew up and left behind a girl who I spent nearly every day with after elementary school. I can't imagine how I'd feel if I learned that she suffered the same kind of fate as Melissa. That's got to be really tough.