I have an actual hometown. You know, the kind you see on TV, where it’s smallish and quaint and has weird tics that everyone who lives there knows about and just accepts as something that is something that you do. Or is.
And it is an actual hometown for me, because I was born there and spent most of my childhood there, and because most of my family (sibling, parent, grandparent) still live there, and still live in the same houses. So it was formative in many ways.
Now, some time after I left home for college (which was quite some time ago, but I’m not going to tell you exactly how much because it makes me feel old) my hometown decided it was going to reinvent itself. It’s always been kind of a weird relic of the Old West, despite having been absorbed by urban sprawl, but it was decided to, hm, modernize it, I suppose might be the right term. Tear down some of the old things that had been there forever and make new, modern versions of the same thing that was supposed to evoke the town’s history. Pretty up the historic things that were too valuable to replace. Urbanize the “downtown” area and make it the sort of place that young people with lots of money would want to hang out.
You know, that sort of thing.
I’ve watched it happen with mixed feelings, as I suppose most people do/would in the situation. Sure, that 3-story parking garage clears up the parking issues, but it’s literally taller than anything else downtown. Sure, the motorcycles growling down the street were annoying, but they’d been there forever and we were used to it. Little stores and restaurants that had been there my whole life have gone out of business and been replaced with chains.
(I still miss the five and dime. Sigh.)
But for all the new buildings and facelifts and statues (there are so many statues), there’s some of that old charm still lurking. Yesterday I got off at the exit that goes by the house I was born in. It’s still there, with the same stone fence I used to run through to visit my cousins (who lived across the street). I drove down the back way, past the feed store, to the Sinclair lurking across from the factory. Apart from the credit card readers on the pumps, it could have been thirty years ago, when my parents brought me home the blow-up dinosaur from it.
And from there, past the grocery store and the church and up past the college to my grandmother’s–despite the new medians and the weird overpass, I could see my hometown. And it was good to know it was still there, despite all the changes, despite the fact that I left it long ago.
Have a hometown, friends? Has it changed for good or bad over the years?