Drifting Back
Revisiting your hometown after decades of absence is a bit like meeting up with a long lost lover. The details that once delighted you bring a new joy on rediscovery: bliss recaptured! Then you begin to notice the changes, and wonder what you missed in the intervening years. Wistfulness bubbles up; curiosity, wondering, what if?
I recently spent an afternoon walking through my old hometown of Fillmore, from the hills in the east to the western flatland. Even as I approached the town, my heart beat faster. A bright sun shone down on the surrounding mountains, shadowed by blue ridges, skirted by rows of orange trees. Clouds of pepper trees dot the landscape, and the sight of them arouses a longing I can't quite place. A banner greets me as my bus turns on to Central Avenue: "Flower Show, April 14th." Memories, flooding in on a surge of emotion. A sunny morning, little girls gathering up dirt, small branches, flowers, marbles, figurines, and a tiny mirror to create a lake, all put in a bowl or planter to enter in the Flower Show. Our earnest creations were displayed for the whole town to see; we were part of the big event!
My old friend Tom picks me up at the bus stop/senior center, both acquired some time after I left town in 1970. He drives me out of town through the orchards of Grand Avenue where I spent the latter half of my childhood. There is no way to describe the fragrance of thousands of blooming orange trees other than simply a sense of great floating gladness. My whole life in Fillmore was spent across the street from orange groves, their scent defining spring. After lunch at a new-to-me restaurant across the highway, we drive up Central Avenue, around the loop of Foothill Drive, where my parents had once planned to build a custom home, and I get out at the bottom - the top of our main street, Central Avenue. How different would my life have been, living near the lights of town? But my teenage years were destined to be lived on the Rural Route.
Now on my own, my first order of business is to walk up Fourth Street to Mountain View and visit my first remembered home. Everything about the blocks I walk - east, then south, - feels familiar yet nonspecific, until I come to the former home of our next-door neighbors, the Blythes. Stab of recognition, even though it's changed a lot. The bushes which concealed the youthful explorations of the little neighborhood boys and girls have been cut down and there is no trace left. The street is empty now, but I see the ghost of the old Helms bakery truck, hear the tinkle of the ice cream man, and remember milk delivered to our door in glass bottles by the Sanitary Dairy.
Our old three-bedroom bungalow doesn't look much like I remembered it. The owners are in the midst of installing one of those modern front yards with bushes and succulents, which is fine, I guess, I’m thinking of doing the same thing at my home in Oakland; but entirely alien to my childhood. Determined in my search for memories, I head around the block to the alley, passing on the way the sites of my most vivid moments of danger: the time Judy Martin told me that the flat, layered type of rock she had just picked up meant that there was going to be an earthquake, and I was unable to go get my little sister Sally to protect her; the time our 8-year-old neighbor boy, "Buzz" Gibby made me cry by forcing me to inhale ammonia, then threatened to burn our house down (by the unlikely method of squirting water into our broken doorbell) if I didn't get poor Sally out to smell it also; San Cayetano Elementary School, where my sister and I ran away with that same bad Judy Martin to play, although our parents had specifically forbidden it. The mix of excitement and dread – for of course we guilelessly stayed until our parents found us out – culminated in a spanking by my father, the last one I ever remember getting, and the moment I realized that the fear was much worse the pain inflicted by my kind-hearted dad.
As a second-grader at San Cayetano, I once refused to play with the other kids for a few days, maybe a week. What prompted this decision, I have no idea. I remember feeling lonely, but in my aloneness I felt a certain power, a feeling I still revisit, for better or worse. Mixed with those memories was the image of the sprinklers on that green lawn in the summertime, when we walked down to the school for "arts and crafts" classes to make tile mosaics and glazed enamel doodads, and time seemed endless. Of course my first day of first grade, spent in the most beautiful full-skirted, red-plaid dress ever sold at Sears, took place in the old school, down the street. Later in the year, the day San Cayetano was ready for us, we all walked down the street to our new classrooms.
Walking down the alley behind our old house I had a vision of the time Phyllis Davis ran out into the alley chasing little Laurie with a flyswatter. That was somewhat amusing - Laurie was a bit of a devil, and her mom looked like she was losing an ongoing battle of wills - but other memories of children and dogs being punished came back uncomfortably. Images of brutality seem inevitable as I look back on the time when I was learning about the ways of the world and my own vulnerability.
Treading onward, I at last come to our "back 40," a 30’ by 40’ bit of land behind the back fence. Our childhood wilderness area now held a canvas-covered RV and a nice garage, but there is still a small swath of dirt and weeds through which I can access the back fence and peek through the slats. The swing set, and the little girls in frilly dresses who climbed to the top of it at birthday parties, are gone, but the brick patio my parents laid is still there, as well as the concrete sidewalk that we watched being poured from a small cement mixer. There's the window of the room where two little girls, then three, slept; the third bedroom was reserved as a den, where we ate buttery popcorn out of enameled metal bowls in front of the TV. On some of our long free days at home, my mom would send Sally and me out "exploring:" she packed us a lunch, and told us not to cross any streets. We walked around the block or down the alley, found a grassy spot someone's lawn, and ate our lunch, feeling very independent.
My feet, the same feet that walked these sidewalks then, now lead me to wander south on Clay Street, where my friend Dora used to live. I relived playing with Dora, her siblings, our friend Richard, and their dog. Once Dora told me the story of the time the dog bit their mom when she spanked her brother. They had a packed dirt yard, and Oklahoma accents; I used to walk the three blocks to visit them by myself.
Back north on Saratoga Street, tidy wood-sidinged houses on the street, left on Second Street, and rolling back down to Central Avenue. A stop at our sweet little library, which is just as I remember it, no need to ask directions to the bathroom. It's just where it was 45 years ago, when I devoured the six psychology books they had back then. Self-awareness was viewed with suspicion in the Fillmore of the sixties. Across the street, chain-link fences with strong locks have been added to the high school, along with stern warnings to strangers. I have to content myself with memories of the places my wonderful, forbidden boyfriend Joe and I used to secretly meet: behind the library after school; among the lockers at the junior high, empty at night, long since razed. Two lively, curious teenagers, celebrating their new joy like teenagers the world over, world without end.
Being in high school meant that the exciting things, like dances and basketball games, happened at night now. The big event for me was the Christmas pageant. Waiting backstage in the darkened gym to go out and perform "Stille Nacht" and "Adeste Fideles" with the other language students was filled with such mystery and anticipation. I seemed to feel most at the edge of adulthood then.
On, backward in time again, to Sespe School. The pepper trees under which I ate my salami sandwich every non-rainy day of fourth, fifth, and sixth grades are gone, replaced by temporary classrooms; yet a lot of the grassy yard remains. Did it ever happen again, two innocent 10-year-old girls strolling around the big lawn chatting, interrupted by an emissary from Mr. McBrine, ordering them to stop holding hands?
I start to feel tired, but can't resist retracing my steps from the elementary school to the house in the "new tract" to which we moved in 1959. With only two floor plans, it's hard to distinguish our old house, which we lived in for only a year, from all the others. But I stop dead in front of Candy and Kathy Krska’s house. Same color blue, same wrought-iron panel in front of it. It was the morning meeting place from which the Krska girls, Christine Paulson, Patty Orr, and I started our walk to school together. Around the block to Los Serenos Drive. There in the bend is the Palazzis’ old house, and next-door, the Tysons’. During one backyard barbecue at the Palazzis’, I witnessed, with surprise and dismay, Jane Tyson doing a cartwheel, a skill which I had not mastered, and never would. We all traveled by skates and bikes around our new stucco world.
Long walk back to town, checking my watch to make sure I don't miss my pick-up time with Tom. New houses have sprung up where the orange trees were pulled out, along with streets bearing the surnames of my former classmates. They look like nice little homes; some have dead brown lawns and old toys, but most are nicely kept up. Who knows which belong to a large, happy family squeezing into three bedrooms; to a woman working evenings at the convalescent home and her unemployed husband who watches daytime TV after getting the kids off to school, to a young couple delighted with their new baby and scrimping to pay the mortgage? Past the old packinghouse, part of which has been replaced by a shiny new fire station. Tom tells me later that the city made a lot of money on a now-illegal kickback scheme, resulting in a number of city improvements. Oh, Fillmore, my old love, did you really sell your honor to get plastic surgery?
Past the school again, brief detour to the small apartment on Orchard Street where my parents lived when I was born. It later became the optometry office of Dr. Palazzi, but now it's someone's apartment again, across from the kindergarten.
Time to go downtown, always a highly anticipated event. I turn left at the traffic light, hoping the old Safeway still holds a market where I can get a soda. Nope, just auto parts. I cross the street to where the Sprouse Ritz five-and-dime store used to be, remembering my dad, (after losing a case early in his law practice?) singing a popular jingle with different words: "We're doing our Christmas shopping/at Sprouse Ritz this year…" Blue letters on the window read "Eli's Tienda de Discuenta." So that's changed, but not much. A few doors down, – where the pool hall used to be? – I find the nice new Central Station Bar and Grill. Outdoor seating with green umbrellas and a fancy barbecue in front. As it is across the country, the poor and working-class anchor the economic spectrum, as the upper middle class float upward. Here, it all happens on the same block.
Okay, I need a root beer. A picture of the old A&W drive-in with its root beer floats propels me forward. The good old Central Market, they've got to have root beer. But no, only the abomination that is diet A&W. A Jarritos tamarindo soda looks perfect, and it is. I amble south past the post office, wondering what happened to the newsstand where we used to buy penny candy after church. The last time I remember us doing that was in the week after my father died, in 1970, wrapped in grief, but comforted by our old ritual. Past the old Sweet Shop, where as high school students we stared openly through the window at the hippies who had stopped to eat there on their way through, and dreamed of going with them. At the corner, the Fillmore Market, ceiling hung with intricate Mexican paper cutouts. It used to be the only place in Fillmore to buy albums, four dollars each. I counted my money in four-dollar units back then, saving up for the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker.
I would love to sit down! I cross Central Avenue to the grassy square fronting a new gleaming City Hall. It's all very impressive, but there's nowhere to sit, no benches, nowhere to loiter. Innocent loitering is now as much a thing of the past as girls walking a mile to school cradling their books in their arms. I cast my mind back to the annual Fillmore Festival. A big dusty carnival was set up every year, somewhere around here. Even back then, it seemed like a secret space opened up for the carnival every year during the Pioneer Days, and then closed again when they were over. Now, that space is forever lost to me.
I hear my name. Tom's here to pick me up. At my request, he takes me by the Methodist Church. Seeing the parish hall, I can't help crying out, "There's where Santa came out!" Visions of ribbon candy dance in my head.
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