Nostalgia and Other Stuffings

With the holidays comes the hometown. With the hometown come the changes. Old landmarks leveled, new neighborhoods created, absent friends, strange faces--the melancholy reminders that a once familiar place has become, in a year, that much less so.

I drive past a house that used to be home and through the dining room window see the forms of strangers moving about inside. I go to the bar where each holiday returning classmates have reconvened and discover it has been torn down, replaced by a linen warehouse. Attempting to navigate subdivisions that a year ago were open fields, I become lost and, becoming lost, I become angry. Strange.

It feels at first like betrayal, this refusal of the old hometown to deliver the one thing returning pilgrims want most--the comfort of sameness, stability. While hometown for me happens to be Fresno, I suspect my discomfort is shared by many California natives returned for Thanksgiving. Growth and change are unrelenting elements of this state, and will remain so as long as there is open land, easy water and people who don’t like to shovel snow. Nothing stays the same in California.

*

I came home Wednesday. Driving into town on California 99 I scanned for the familiar, the downtown bank tower, the Armenian church steeple, the auto junkyards that form a southern perimeter of twisted rust.

The eye moved next to the new--the arched City Hall that debuted this year amid much guffawing; the bright new look of the mid-town shopping center, long ago left in the dust by a city moving north.

My parents live toward the north of town. Two years ago their house stood on the frontier of the outward migration, with an unrestricted view toward the Sierra. Look that way now and you see new rooftops. My mother reports that a car was stolen on the block last week, a neighborhood first. This is how it begins. A few more years, and it will be time to leapfrog north again.

Conversations: My brother-in-law and I watch sea gulls in flight overhead and remember when gigantic formations of southbound ducks and geese used to flap over Fresno each fall; we’re not sure where the birds went. My sister confesses a fear of carjackings, Fresno having caught up with the latest crime trend. My best friend resumes an old game, attempting to lure me back home for good. The bait used to be a promise of good times. Then it was cheap housing. Now, it is “blue ribbon” schools.

The newspaper always provides a shortcut back into the hometown rhythm. This trip the local news was of holiday travel and a record murder count, of good citizens and graffiti. Nobody I knew made the obituary page or crime reports. Jim Wasserman, a Bee columnist, published a chatty holiday letter to welcome returning sons and daughters like myself:

“Two weeks ago, they unveiled a new classical music radio station, the second one in town now, and Wednesday, the biggest bookstore ever seen around here opened at Shaw and Blackstone avenues. And that’s across the street from a new computer software discount chain. All this somehow signifies the arrival of civilization.”

*

Yes, Fresno seems more civilized with every return visit. It’s got it all now, drive-bys and discounted software. Funny, though, after a few days here the town again has started to feel a bit like my old Fresno, small and familiar, comfortable.

And as I contemplate returning to Los Angeles, a city where I have lived 10 years but will never truly know--who does?--my initial dismay over what Fresno has become begins to seem more than a bit foolish.

On replay, it sounds not unlike the high-pitched carping of some cranky old coot--or better, like noise from one of our many politicians whose vision for California is limited to still-lifes from a lily white, wealthy past. Raise the drawbridge, and remember what used to be!

My emotion now is one of wistfulness at leaving: blue ribbon public schools sound pretty good; there are worse things than growth, especially if it can be managed. Which leads to the danger of wallowing in nostalgia. If we focus too much on what once was--and can never be again--we blind ourselves to the potential of the present and, worse, we fumble away our best chance to shape what is to come. It’s called the future, and everyone’s got one. Even Fresno.