I realize that recently I have written several notes that do nothing but heap unending encomium on Kittery; and maybe it is the Eden I have made it out to be, but a new thought strikes me: maybe I'm wrong. Oh, not that Kittery is some gehenna or something...some fiery garbage dump, but rather it could have been the time that I lived there that was expressly special and heavenly. Perhaps in my actual love and longing for that time, I was mistaken in that I tried to translate that temporal love into a physical one; I tried to love and praise a place, instead of a time, an era. Maybe if I could relive it all nowadays, I would hate it, reviling in the end, even my blessed, beloved, quintessentially American Kittery. It has come to mind that it might just be the period of 1988-1998 or 1985-1998 that made that place and those people seem so unutterably special-that has made me be so painterly, sycophantic and encomiastic towards it. And maybe even the sumac thickets, the sumac stands, the sumac groves and the lots on which they stand, scruffy with weeds, or the arboreal zones in which they flourish, maybe even they, though currently singularly beautiful, aren't all that great now either. Maybe they were greater then. I suppose even the time that came before my time may have been a good one in Kittery, but I think that really it was that 10 or 13 year stretch of time that made all the difference. Perhaps if I had remained there beyond that timeperiod, I would have grown to hate it. But, perhaps not. And maybe the interesting places within Kittery, like some of the stores-those which are defunct and nonexistent now (like Osco's and the Sparkle Spot) and those that despite their musty age, and the fact that they are (like the Frisbee's Market...yet that does not remain anymore, sadly; especially considering I only ever went in there one time in all the long years that it was there...or perhaps twice or thrice, but clearly no more than five times and only when I was in Kittery Point for some other reason, which was not that often...at least not, ironically, in the final days of Frisbee's Market) mainstays in Kittery (like Carl's Meat Market and Golden Harvest and Dairy Queen and Jackson's Hardware...places like that...fixtures eternally in fair Kittery); maybe even those places aren't really as wonderful as I make them seem. Maybe it is more the infusion of the eolian time that made them that way to me, back then, but never now-unless of course I had experienced and known them then, which I did, having grown up there. There are few parks or nonscholastic playgrounds, public playgrounds in Kittery, but the few there are, I have played in, ironically, mostly only as an adult. Yet I recall the playgrounds of Shapleigh and Frisbee most fondly...as I do also even the parking lot of Traip Academy, though some bastard once pushed me down when my back was to him there....and though, another time, another bastard once crammed a cake down my face. And indeed, even Shapleigh and Frisbee's playground's Edenic pulchritude and pleasantness were marred by similar incidents...yet still I remember all fondly. But the air was sweeter then and for the most part, America was more American then. It was a glorious time, a time that superceded the inborn, component glory of the locale entire itself...of even the riparian environ in which I dwelt then. The air was balmier, sweeter, more fragrant with the glorious promise and possibility of childhood. It was suffused with it. And it crackled electrically with it, alive and blue-white. And maybe there was superabundant energy then, too. Not just in me because I was a boundless, irrepressible, adventurous youth, but present invisibly yet substantially, diffused evenly yet copiously across the breadth of the air itself. But things were different then. Though that doesn't mean to say or imply that I detest Kittery now, merely because it is not exactly like it was then anymore, for the time made it great, aggrandized it yet simplified it and in remembering it, it gains a certain hopeful, happy, sunshiny cast to it now. If I adore it, it is almost solely, certainly because of my stint as a youthful resident there. And if I wish to return to it, to visit temporarily or even re-reside there, that wish is grounded in the bedrock of temporality. Of it's evidentiary existence as the capital of my childhood and the entirety of my world then. It was my universe, my omniverse then, peopled with a thousand clusters of miniature galaxies, all of which I wanted to explore and God help me, so I did explore most of it, much of it-even that one dense, tree-fringed marsh that lay along the the bowl of a valley formed by a hill, at the outskirts of the sphere of influence of a cantankerous man who claimed he would shoot me if I did not vacate this property. For he, he was the guardian supreme and entire of that marsh-or so he fancied himself. In reality he was just a crazy old man-correction: a crazy gun-totting old man. One of whom I was quite afraid, though I never saw him, only heard his throaty, disembodied voice floating sinisterly along the edge of the balmy air, floating down to me, alive and gravid with it's terrible promise...one to be carried out in full if I did not flee that man's property, only the hem of which was grassy and nice and well-maintained. Yet in time, in the end, years later (or so it seemed them but in reality it may only have been a few months afterward) I was able to explore that marshy zone, if only perhaps from a different angle; and, in that I got gross, jetty, thick and fetid swamp-mud on my shoes and pants-cuffs, it may have been better for me if I had obeyed that man's odd directive. Yet, it was not as if that man meant to protect me and my shoes...no, he just had an abundance of crazy feeling, something like fanatical love and worship, for that fen. But I still traversed it, and was not shot at, thankfully. Yes, there are many tales I could tale, storied threads I could weave that would compose the entire tapestry, the entire volume of my life in Kittery. Some of the stories might be good, some bad, but all, in my hands, seen and reported through my singular eyes and diffused further by my copious talent, would be interesting, descriptive and somehow, even when telling of tragedy and injustice, good. Yet, I digress, for that was not the real intent of this essay of sorts. But I think that that, too, gets the point across quite nicely. And in the end, it was that possibly irretrievable time that mattered, not the place...or not just, not only the place, it was temporal-spatial deal, that the time and the place working, fusing together in tandem, made it what it was: eternally, greatly wondrous and unique and glorious...fretted fully with the pennants and flags of youth, all of them, from the lowliest champaign, to the steppe, to the tree-studded hill, to the beach and headland and islands and peninsulas and points (such as Juniper Point), flapping graciously in the breezes blowing in from paradise...or heaven. But you wonder how many other people, even those that suffered some of the beatings and injustices and detentions that I did occasionally back then, who experienced that time also, feel that nostalgic, loving, sentimental way towards Kittery..as I do, but probably as I did not or at least did not fully then. Time and place together were the components, the elements that made it all worthwhile. Eternally worthwhile....so long as you experienced it then. Or so I think-maybe I am mistaken in that concept...but I don't believe so. No; I don't.
No comments:
Post a Comment