this morning i decided i needed to do something, anything, to make myself feel a bit alive. so i got into my car with my wawa cup and just drove off. i ended up on cherokee road driving along the river west and on to old gun road.
i was taken with the quiet and the relaxed, calming look of those houses perched along the river's edge. it was upstream from the huguenot bridge and before the wiley bridge. one house was up on the ridge, looking down at the river field below it. there was a series of decks climbing down. the house itself was an older model, probably at least 40 years ago. the architecture reminded me of warnie and uncle harry's neighborhood in norfolk.
the houses were large and some were new, some were old. bellona arsenal was taking up a huge area along the river at one point around where cherokee blended into old gun road. that was what appeared to be a working farm, with cows and barns and trees. you couldn't see the river from the road, but it felt very civil war era-ish. the brick remains of the arsenal are in a curve along the road, with a huge house on the other side of the road looking down on the ruins. there were lots of huge houses, most of them almost of another era, but huge enough to be impressive...the way the other half lives. there are a lot of trees leafing over the road and surrounding most of those homes. some of the homes had long driveways and brick columns at the ends of the driveways. most of the houses were way to big to be lived in by me, but i kept thinking that if i had a lot of money, i would buy that red house with the decks and porch. i almost wanted to stop and take a picture of it. it seemed like it could have been the cover for a george winston album. at the time i was playing the "Christmas Blessings-Narada Xmas collection vol. 3" which is new age, ethereal kind of music.
once i left this area, i wandered back south into the area of southside that i grew up in in chesterfield. i ended up driving down roads that i drove around on a lot 35-40 years ago. i guess i was thinking that a trip down memory lane would make me feel better. instead, i was almost lost the whole way. the way i see the world is the imprint of what i see now over the picture of what it was. it is almost like there are 2 levels of viewing. but today, that wasn't happening, simply because the landscape had changed so radically that there was no connection between the views. i drove around to providence middle school, and for the most part that had not changed. i was reminded as i drove slowly past of my first kiss. a boy named randy white kissed me during the halftime of an afternoon basketball game, and we were leaning against the building next to the door.
i drove the back way into surreywood and got lost. this is because all that i was driving through had been nothing but thick woods, a place to explore, when i was a kid. we used to follow paths through the fields and woods with our pocket knives. there was a stream to cross where someone had built a makeshift bridge, and paths on the other side where they ran coon dogs at night. i used to listen to them at night in the winter, and it was a beautiful, bell like sound. that sound, combined with crisp winter air and the smell of leaves burning or woodsmoke from chimneys is one of my better enduring memories of childhood. in those days there were absolutely no houses and only a few, unpaved roads. there was a big old stone outcropping that we walked to and sat on a lot. now it is decoration in someone's front yard. how would they ever know that place in it's original form? we used to sled down that hill in the snow as well. even when i lived there, they were always carving out more and more roads, building more and more houses. but there were always woods and paths. you just had to walk a little further. but now, they don't exist, not at all. the trees that were young then are 40 years older now, more bark, bigger, more shady branches. but what is beneath them is no longer crisp, crushed leaves and blackened paths made by the feet of dogs and children wandering through the woods looking for something.
so i didn't really sharpen the edges much, and when i left, i went out of the world of trees and shaded homes into the glare of shopping centers and run down storage places, made over fast food places, garages, cheap junky places. i followed hull street into the city, and then turned back on to jahnke road to go to the apartment complex i lived in for 5 years. i had a hard time finding it because the trees had grown up, the apartment complexes were now surrounded by streets and homes that didn't exist 20 years ago. and st. john's woods is no longer a woods. it isn't even an apartment complex that i could see. it appears that the trees are gone, replaced by condos out shining in the light, so exposed. and i keep thinking about all of the wild and furtive things that so many of us did in that apartment complex. it was sort of a traveling social gathering, everyone knowing everyone else, moving from one apartment to another, one drama to the next. not there now, just like that life came and went. things were a lot fuzzier for me as i crossed back over the the river. for a while when i first started that trek, i was thinking that i wanted to go back there, but i realize that doesn't exist anymore and the person i was doesn't exist in that form either.
it kinda makes you wonder what makes you what you are. i find a lot of comfort returning to spots of that movie, and i plunge in with music and maybe watching old tv shows or slick 70's movies with the cheesy suits and god awful haircuts. the funny thing is that at the time, i wasn't really a part of that either, and i wasn't happy.
so when have i been happy? and the answer is i guess that i am still searching for that extended time. it has been brief in places. i spent so much of my life in depression, and then there were drugs. thank god for better living through modern chemistry. at least i have had the middle ground for a long time. but i think i am slipping below the line now, and i think i have been doing that for a long while. now i am at the point where i just don't care, which means i guess that i OUGHT to care. the lack of caring about just about anything is what is making me see that i have to find something to fix this. i am wasting a lot of light.
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