A Letter to Me

I haven’t written in a while, and one of the reasons dates back to last fall. That’s when I pulled off I-210 onto Lake Street in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and merged into heavy multilane traffic before turning west onto Prien Lake Road, the town’s main east-west connector, and heading toward my childhood home. My homeplace now belongs to a younger sister, and I was there for the annual gathering of the men in our family.

As I made those last few turns, I was struck by how unfamiliar the streets I had once known intimately had become. The ugliness of the modern landscape has stuck with me. What was once a street of mom-and-pop businesses, wide sidewalks, and brick-and-mortar storefronts is now a four-lane thoroughfare of shopping centers, national chains, and wall-to-wall concrete.

Even now, six months later, I still find myself mulling over the question that came to me that day: How can younger generations aspire to preserve something they have never experienced?

All towns change. They become cities, and cities become megacities. Empty lots become buildings, houses burn and get rebuilt, longtime businesses close and are repurposed. Populations grow, stagnate, decline. Change happens, and “progress,” that worst of all fates, takes root and spreads. Driving through the town of one’s birth and not recognizing much except road signs is not new. It’s something I experience every time I return home. But the layers of change that once accreted slowly now grow like a tumbling snowball that takes on a life of its own. The layers are so dense that they are finally becoming a barrier to memory, to the recognition of a life and place I knew so well.

As a child I rode my bike three miles to the public library on these same streets, streets that today only the homeless, the drunk, and the hopelessly courageous navigate on foot. How could the population numbers remain virtually unchanged yet the streetscape become so grotesque? Where are those formerly quiet streets between here and there? Why is seemingly everyone now out and about, in a car, in a hurry? Where are they going on these four-lane streets of no sidewalks? Will they even know when they have arrived?

How can anything be preserved when most are too young to remember anything worth preserving—especially when the features most in need of preservation are not only physical, but also senses of place, history, texture, and belonging. The time and town in which I grew up were not perfect, yet they were built of a scale and tempo that allowed me to experience that “placeness,” and to know that I was there. To see it, and now to remember it.

To the younger generation, I fear this world must seem as if it has always been like this: depressing and dystopic, a blur of concrete, signs, and screens (always the screens). What responsible parent would allow a child out in this world? How can today’s children build a sense of place, identity, and affection for where they live amidst this “progress”? Why would we desire to protect a world that hasn’t even been experienced, is no longer there to see? Where is the quiet pacing and modest bustle of life? Who now can experience the childhood joy and independence of bicycling alone, let alone to spend a pleasant hour at the library?

At home in Tennessee, driving down a back road, I am saddened by the sight of a still-lovely valley near our farm. Yes, it is as yet undeveloped; it remains well-used for growing crops and raising cattle, its solid, red-roofed barns dotting the fields, its people living quietly and productively. But it lives on borrowed time. Its future is already blueprinted, filed away in the county courthouse, its destiny already cast in the suburban developments just one exit to the north—ugly, unloved, unexperienced, and unremembered.

I am fortunate enough to have lived in this diminished world before it was gone, and to know what has been lost. Without that memory, I wonder how anything will shape this world into something a boy on a bike would remember and cherish.

……………………………………….

Yet, in this corner of this good creation, my collards and cabbages (above) are looking pretty darned lovely. That is worth preserving and remembering.

……………………………………….