ARCHIVED POSTS
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August 30, 2017
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, BUT…
DANCING WITH GHOSTS – Photo by Nancy Hoffman
Thomas Wolfe famously said “You can’t go home again.” And he was right. You can’t go home again because home has changed, the people have changed, the places have changed and you have changed as well. Home is not the same place you left, and you are not the same person who left there.
But you can go back to a place, a place where you once lived, and conjure up the people who were once part of your life there and of the child you once were and who once was part of the place and the community.
I was conjuring big time last week during a visit to my home town of St. Petersburg, Florida. There was a time, right after World War II, when I was just a little kid, and my mother and father were still in their 20s, and they were young and happy and looking forward to making more babies and getting on with their lives.
It was different being a kid back then, and I had learned the rules early on: Children were made to be seen, not heard.
That meant you could stick around and watch and listen, but you couldn’t interrupt the grownups and when you were addressed, you said “yes sir” or “yes ma’am,” and you never, ever talked back unless you wanted your fanny slapped. It wasn’t a bad system because when you listened to adults, you learned about being an adult and about the world outside your immediate family.
GULFPORT CASINO
My dad’s younger brother, Henry Cunningham was also back from the war. He had married my Aunt May, and they lived down the street. The four of them would go out dancing together, and I would get to listen to their stories when they came home. One of their places was the Gulfport Casino. It wasn’t a gambling casino, but rather, it was a casino in the original sense, a sort of community center, where people could get together to socialize and hold special events. Every week, there would be dances at the Casino and sometimes my parents and my uncle and aunt would go there to dance.
Gulfport at the time was a little working-class community with a population of fishermen, boatwrights, carpenters, painters, mechanics and other blue-collar folks. Good people, but generally not very sophisticated. My parents and my aunt and uncle would come home after these dances and laugh about what they called the “Gulfport Pump Handle.” They would dance around, with one arm around the other’s waist and the opposite arms extended straight out, hands joined, pumping up and down to the music.
Then they would laugh, and I would laugh too, although I had never been to a dance and had no idea how you were supposed to do it. As a matter of fact, I still don’t.
Those were happy years for my mother and father and for my aunt and uncle, and as the oldest of my generation I was soaking it all in. Sometimes, if I had been good, I was allowed to go along with the adults to a place called Johnny’s – a little coffee shop out in the sticks north of town. I think my dad knew Johnny from the war or maybe he was a pal of my Uncle Hank’s.
The adults would talk about life and the world as they ate their food, and when they were finished, they would light up cigarettes and talk about their plans and hopes for the future, then they’d snub the smokes out in the plates with the left-over food. I would listen and learn, and think about how I would act when I became a grownup – although at that stage of life, being an adult seemed so far in the future that it was more a concept than a reality. Kind of like going to heaven or getting on a spaceship and flying to the moon.
My mom and my aunt were both full of life and happy to be out in the world with their husbands. It was a nice time for them and for me, but such times always end. My mother and father separated some years later, and he died of pancreatic cancer in 1965. My Uncle Henry died in 1986, my mother in 2001, and my Aunt May in 2013.
Thomas Wolfe was correct. You really can’t go home again. But you can take a moment to stop and remember what once was and what will never be again.
It’s a sweet thing to do on a sunny afternoon in Gulfport, Florida, but it’s a sad thing as well.
Do you have a dissenting opinion or any opinion at all on the subject? Contact me at george@georgeleecunningham.com and let me know. Meanwhile, you can always subscribe and get an email reminder of blog postings. Your name will not be shared and you may cancel at any time.
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August 13, 2017
Magic Times and Magic Places
SEA DREAMS – Artist Catherine Lee
Thirty-two years ago, Carmela and I spent six weeks in Brazil – four of them in Rio de Janeiro and the other two traveling around that lovely land, visiting jungles and waterfalls, swamps and rivers, cities and countryside. It was more than beautiful. It was magical.
We never went back, I don’t know why exactly. Maybe we feared the second time around it would be a lovely place, but not the magic place it had once been. Magic is elusive. It’s not where you are, it’s what is inside you at the time. You can go to the same place, see the same things, listen to the same lovely music, but the magic has slipped away.
But the magic of that adventure remains in our memories and in our hearts.
There was that time we almost died in the ocean just a few hundred feet from the shops and high-rise apartments along Avenida Atlantica. We had been warned about the rip tides and currents that stalked the beach that time of year, but we were relying on the magic of the moment to protect us. And it did.
When the first huge breaker drove us under, then the second one swirled us upside down, I reached out, found Carmela’s hand and pushed off from the sandy bottom. We survived, clambered back ashore, went to our rented apartment, took a shower, and then went out to dinner. Another good day in Rio.
The ocean wasn’t the only danger in Rio. We were warned again and again. Watch your back, don’t wear any jewelry that can be snatched from your ears or jerked off your fingers, and don’t think of resisting, especially if there is more than one robber. And yet, we wandered where we chose, and the magic remained. Some of the most beautiful and exciting places on the planet are also the most dangerous. Such concerns can’t defeat the magic of time or place.
Then there were the beggar kids, homeless boys who hustled money shining shoes. When they were young and still cute, they survived on handouts from tourists and even some sympathetic Cariocans, as the residents or Rio are known. But when they grew older, not so cute, and resentful of their lot in life, they often turned to crime.
There was one young boy we became attached to. He would greet us on the street and we would talk in a hodge-podge of broken English and fractured Portuguese. When we left, a few weeks later, he gave us one more shoeshine – refusing to take any money for it. A token of our friendship. A little more magic.
If the world had been fair, we would have taken that kid home and made him part of our family. As it was, we thanked him, gave him a hug, and walked away.
After Rio, we traveled around that big, beautiful, wild country – to the Amazon and the Pantanal swamp wilderness, and to Iguazu Falls on the border of Brazil and Argentina. We flew in and out of single runway airports that had been carved out of the jungle – loading and unloading passengers at every stop as though the plane were a city bus.
There were snakes and exotic birds. There were capybara, the world’s largest rodent. Scores of caiman, the Brazilian version of alligators, lined the river banks. Indian kids fished from the same bank. And of course, there were the legendary and deadly piranha that lurked beneath the surface.
We still think about going back sometimes, but would Rio and Brazil hold the same enchantment as it did on the trip so long ago. Probably not.
But what if it did?
Do you have a dissenting opinion or any opinion at all on the subject? Contact me at george@georgeleecunningham.com and let me know. Meanwhile, you can always subscribe and get an email reminder of blog postings. Your name will not be shared and you may cancel at any time.