REFLECTIONS OF A LIFE, Chapter 16: Checking Out Old Memories

Chapter 16

Checking Out Old Memories

            In the summer of my 78^th year, I had a yearning to revisit the places of my youth.  I suspect this is a natural urge for some people, and is encouraged by high school and college reunions.  I tried to analyze my reasons for contemplating such pilgrimages, but they seemed hidden in the deep recesses of ancient memories.  Maybe they come from wanting to imagine again what it was like to be young, to salvage the long-ago feelings and perceptions. More likely, it reflects a curiosity to see the changes wrought in over fifty years and how the realities might differ from the memories.

            Three places were most prominent in my youthful memories.  I had lived on the high plains of western Kansas at a very impressionable age, going to the 2^nd and 3^rd grades in Norton, and in later summers, visiting my dad and his family for one or two weeks and learning to drive on the lonesome two-lane roads between his stores that usually culminated in a thrilling trip to Denver and the mountains that never failed to tantalize me—with me doing most of the driving.  Mountains still so affect me—maybe some primordial magnetism—as does the treeless rolling land of big vistas of these western plains, be they Kansas, Nebraska, or Dakota.

            My mother and I left Kansas for South Dakota and I went to the 4^th grade in Watertown, in the northeastern part of the state.  This was still a treeless land but flatter than farther west, with a few lakes, but far colder and a land of the constant wind.

            Finally, my mother and I left Dakota for Des Moines, Iowa where we lived from the 5^th grade through college at Drake University.  After the barrenness of Kansas and Dakota, this seemed a promised land with trees and greenery, and a really big city in the eyes of a child.  This was to have the most memories and was the longest I had ever lived at one place, until decades later I grew deep roots in Shaker Heights.  Among the many memories were those of streetcars, brick streets, scampering squirrels, the time I won a kid’s fishing contest with a 16” sucker, the happy days at Drake University where I was one of the few youngsters amid the host of veterans just back from the War. 

            So, the second week of July Dorothy and I packed up the faithful Lexus and drove to Des Moines.  We could have made it in one day, but encountered massive highway construction south of Chicago, about the worst ever.  So we stopped at Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, where I had participated at a week-long writers’ workshop ten years before.  We reached Des Moines by noon the next day, and found the city center beset with a colossal highway construction project.

            I tried to stimulate the old memories, to nourish them, to try to cherish them.  But in truth the memories were far better than the realization.  Downtown had grown seedy with the closing of the major department store a few years before.  Younkers had once covered a square block, but now was an abandoned hulk, a massive eyesore with no foreseeable solution, a conundrum, since even if razed would still be a gaping sore.  The restaurants and shops that it nourished were gone as well.  I know that many cities have lost major downtown department stores—they are prospering in the suburbs—but some were able to convert the buildings to offices or even apartments and condos.  Apparently not so in Des Moines.

            We drove past the neighborhoods where I had lived, and they were all slums now.  Well, this should have been no surprise.  In fifty years, these lower-middle class neighborhoods likely would have so deteriorated;  it would have been a surprise if they had not.  The city no longer has any brick streets, and no streetcars.  But the squirrels are still there—as they also are in Shaker.

 We drove past St. John’s Church and grade school to where I used to walk from our modest apartment.  The church is big, bigger than the bishop’s cathedral downtown.  It had been constructed in the optimism just before the Depression in the late 1920s.  As harsh economic conditions beset the land, the big windows were plain glass instead of the planned stained glass.  I had wondered if they had ever got their stained glass.  And they had, sometime in the years after I left.  But now the school is closed, and the church evidently has only a few masses.  It probably is too big to tear down, but seems only a backwater, far from the mainstream.

We drove past some of the grand avenues and boulevards I remembered from my youth.  Some of these mansions are still standing, but most are no longer single residences.  The heart of a once vibrant city has been diffused to the suburbs.

            Finally, we stopped at Drake University.  I wanted to donate some of my Mistakes books to the business school.  Drake, despite some new buildings seems to be tired as it sits on the edge of poor neighborhoods.  This is not uncommon for many old universities these days, as their neighborhoods have deteriorated around them, and their campuses have consequently become more internally oriented, with buildings supplying a protective shield from the external environment.  I did not get to meet the dean who was on vacation, but the staff were very cordial and even treated me as some sort of celebrity:  an old alumnus who had published all these books and is a professor emeritus at a distant university.  A few weeks later I got letters from the dean and from the department of alumni affairs.  I think they adopted some of my books.