Nowhere You Know







A lot of people are talking about what they learned from the pandemic.  That's what you do, I guess, after a historical nightmare and collapse of just about every institution and truism you counted on:  you start telling yourself you learned stuff from it all.  It's the way you get through, figuring out how meaning can be made from a situation that really is pretty upfront and conventionally horrifying.  I mean we've lived through Stephen King's biggest book, right?  And here we all are still standing.  Hopefully washing our hands more.  

What I learned from the pandemic:  how to love where I live.  Which is Forest Park, Ohio.  Population 18,583, according to the 2019 census, a decline of .07% from 2010.  There are a lot of "used-to-be's" here in the FP.  A huge vacant mall, a recently shuttered Aldi's, an about-to-close Walmart on Smiley Avenue, a Walgreens transmorgrified into a dialysis center.  A giant vacant Super K-Mart.  A few abandoned houses.  Not as many as you'd think.  A rockin' Kroger that has a parking lot from hell.  An Autozone next to a funeral home.  A long stretch of half-open/half-closed industrial office spaces.  A brand new, super-deluxe high school though.    

Lots of suburban houses and apartment buildings and condos.  This was/is a bedroom community after all.

One great side-note, or maybe it's a full-on attribute:   "After growing to a population of 4800 in 1960 and incorporation as a village in 1961, then achieving city status in 1968, Forest Park intentionally became an “open city,” regularly adopting and passing resolutions and ordinances welcoming citizens regardless of race, creed or national origin, a policy intended to maintain the city's commitment to diversity." (from the FP website)

Yup:  The FP was once cast as a Utopia.  A mid-century stab at diversity.  Now it's just what it is, a Utopia having lost a lot of ground, just like the world.  But here's what:  in 2012 the amount and enthusiasm of home-made Obama signs in people's yards made me proud to be an FP-er, and in 2016 and 2020 the lack of anything Trumpian in anybody's yard did the same.  

I could go on.

Here's my incredibly stupid and blissful point:  during the pandemic, like a lot of people, I went for long walks everyday.  And I took some pictures (see above).  I fell in love with where I live, a nowhere place that somehow during those walks and talks with myself became a strange mythic place outside of the shitty vacant-mall-scapes and copious amounts of car-passenger-flung litter.  During the summer of 2020 I concentrated on this place and its lovely little alcoves, neighborhoods, grassy lots, backyards and parks and ditches and driveways and garages.  The maroons and creams of vinyl-siding shutters and gutters, the busted concrete, the yard ornaments and patios.  I just remember really deeply blue skies and long artful shadows and walking and walking and walking, seeing things I'd seen before of course but now seeing them as somehow mine, part of my world, and it was a really tranquil kind of feeling and exercise.  Like I was trying to create heaven out of nothing, like I was developing my own little sad religion.

I realize now I was in a way.  I mean, I'm almost 57.  In 2021, Bill and I actually put an offer down on a house away from the FP (a few miles down the Winton Road actually), but then decided, after a thorough inspection of the house and finding out all kinds shit was wrong, to stay.  If that inspection had turned out OK, we probably would have moved, but I think in many ways I felt connected to the FP in a deep way that is both nonsensical and visceral, and that instinct or whatever might have kicked in.  

Bill and I grew up here in a lot of ways.  We were 29 when he moved into the condo.  We've spent a majority of our lives living here.  Working a lot, painting paintings, writing books and stories, having parties -- just life.  I needed those pandemic walks, though, to understand the headspace of nowhere, to feel its circumference and geography and poetry.  Staying in a place that's slowly losing itself to whatever forces make places lose themselves is a beautiful way to live, oddly enough.  

You figure out how to look ahead while also surrounded by all kinds of dead futures.  You are constantly telling yourself you are not a ghost, which is a good mantra.  And you still have the ability to see the glitter on the grass, the solid kind faces of people just trying to make it, to keep above water, really tired after work.   

So God bless the FP.  And everyone in it.  And to the .07% who left it too.         

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