I've teased it long enough. It's time to put up or shut up, with the photos and the memories I gathered recently. I have spoken at length about where I grew up in Oklahoma, and the effect it had on me. I had hours of time on my own this past weekend, to drive around and reconnect with the Oklahoma hills where I was born. Well, let me finesse that just a little bit. The building on the exact hill where I was born was torn down years ago, and in its place now stands an abandoned Mays drugstore. It depresses me to see that. I would so much rather see the old maternity building of Valley View still standing there, but the whole complex was long since destroyed when the hospital moved, and now, the new version of the hospital, on the hill where my older daughter was born, isn't even called that anymore. I suspect that if it is anything like any other small town in the world, the old timers don't bother with the new corporate name, and still call it Valley View.
My town has been through an awful lot of boom and bust cycles. Each contraction scares me just a little, and each period of prosperity fills me with conflicting emotions. I don't know why I should feel odd that the town survives without me, but it does and I do. In the old days, the money came from horses and oil. Not long ago, it came from an enterprising legal innovator. Companies and government agencies have come and gone. Our high school football team has moved up and down through so many competition classes, I have no idea who we play against anymore. In my heart the school will always be 3A-- not as big as Tulsa schools, but always bigger than Gotebo. (That's the little town example we were always insulted with when we didn't march well enough in practice to impress the drum majors. "If you can't get it right, go march at Gotebo.") This weekend as I drove around, taking pictures surreptitiously from the car, I died a little inside as I drove on each cracked concrete road, and saw each once-stately old home crumbling in disrepair. Yet, just around the corner from the aging and desperate neighborhoods stood new, ridiculously ostentatious homes. The stratification is extreme in this town, when one just needs to drive a mile from the shacks to see the enormous chateaus.
I saw all the houses where I lived, where my grandparents lived (including the one a half hour north where my dad's parents lived), the schools I attended, the only church I have ever fully joined, the parking lot that covers the ground where my cousin's best party barn once stood, the college dorm where I stayed two summers for gifted and talented camp, the park where my favorite fourth of July memories took place, and the now abandoned entrance to my family's cabin retreat. I almost wish the sun had not been shining so brightly this weekend, because none of the flaws were hidden from view, as they are in my memories from when my ancestors were alive and I was too young to see these places critically. I miss the trees that died from Dutch elm disease and blight, I miss the small town doctor's offices and grocery stores and main street shops. I miss my grandmothers and piano teacher and church choir director and all of the grownups who knew me when I was little. For that matter, I miss being little. Nothing drives home the fact that those years are decades away now than going back and seeing the grand old lady with the lights on, and realizing she just looks like a faded barfly now.
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