It is August the 5th and I'm sitting here in my sweatshirt. Now, this is the kind of summer I'm talkin' about! I can wear shoes without fainting, and my head has ceased to be one big sinus cavity and now I can think about something else besides pining for last winter's snow apocalypse. I'll be honest and repetitive -- I detest hot weather. A few weeks ago I was working out stunned by the amount of sweat pouring down my face. I knew it wasn't because I'd loaded up more weights; it was simply the ambient atmosphere. Were I living 150 years ago in Myrtle
Beach™ instead of strength-training scientifically I'd probably be horseshoed over picking cotton. Or not, because by my age I'd be dead dead dead. I don't have the imagination (or the stomach) to think what life was like then. I only have the gratitude for living now in an era where my biggest problem is a slow DSL connection on rainy days.
My father was one of nine siblings. We went down to celebrate the 80th birthday of the last remaining child of Bessie and George. Otherwise funerals were our only family reunions. My parents were from Georgetown, SC (as is probably 1/5 of the African-American population in this town), and I lived there with my beloved maternal grandmother, Mamie, for a minute between bouts of staggering depression. My memories are punctuated by gaps of four years, the intervals between visits. That's not enough time to know a place, but it is enough to have disorganized and unsorted images that may or may not make sense. When I moved there at 19 the experience of Georgetown was different. I was different -- a difficult, tactiturn college dropout from up north. A child only a grandmother could love; to the others I was either a curiosity, an object of pity or incontrovertible evidence of the gods' rebuke of my parent's ambitions.
Back then, the early 1970's, the place was real. The social order of centuries was just barely giving way. My grandmother and her contemporaries were still alive radiating a quiet pride in what they'd accomplished under apartheid -- beautiful well-kept homes, good livings, children who went to college. The small downtown was still a real downtown, not the theme park for bored golfers, foodies and boaters it has since become. Georgetown and its environs stank when the paper mill operated. It was awful -- an almost hostile amalgamation of farts, cornered skunk and sulphur. There was a synagogue 2 blocks down the street from home. (I had walked by that building dozens of times, but only realized what it was the last time I was there for my mother's funeral. After I'd read some about the history of Jews in the American South only then could I see evidence of their presence.) And undisguised poverty.
And now, with most of the older generation dead and the strip malling, well, there's very little there there for me. I don't mind so much; my attachments were the people, not the homes. But still, it's become harder to distinguish Georgetown from suburban Connecticut. Dunkin Donuts. Walmart. AutoZone. Starbucks. Sprint. And Myrtle Beach? The arable land, the wealth of the Confederacy turned into golf courses and town houses and Columbia, MD-like new communities sprung whole from the real estate developer's mind.
So I visited my Aunt Johanna, she the last of the Pawley's Island Browns. And we took Lilli to the Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church graveyard where my mother and her kin are buried (and where my mother would not recognize the church building or the congregation that now worships there). And frolicked in the ocean for a day and shared the beach with the new south.
My father was one of nine siblings. We went down to celebrate the 80th birthday of the last remaining child of Bessie and George. Otherwise funerals were our only family reunions. My parents were from Georgetown, SC (as is probably 1/5 of the African-American population in this town), and I lived there with my beloved maternal grandmother, Mamie, for a minute between bouts of staggering depression. My memories are punctuated by gaps of four years, the intervals between visits. That's not enough time to know a place, but it is enough to have disorganized and unsorted images that may or may not make sense. When I moved there at 19 the experience of Georgetown was different. I was different -- a difficult, tactiturn college dropout from up north. A child only a grandmother could love; to the others I was either a curiosity, an object of pity or incontrovertible evidence of the gods' rebuke of my parent's ambitions.
Back then, the early 1970's, the place was real. The social order of centuries was just barely giving way. My grandmother and her contemporaries were still alive radiating a quiet pride in what they'd accomplished under apartheid -- beautiful well-kept homes, good livings, children who went to college. The small downtown was still a real downtown, not the theme park for bored golfers, foodies and boaters it has since become. Georgetown and its environs stank when the paper mill operated. It was awful -- an almost hostile amalgamation of farts, cornered skunk and sulphur. There was a synagogue 2 blocks down the street from home. (I had walked by that building dozens of times, but only realized what it was the last time I was there for my mother's funeral. After I'd read some about the history of Jews in the American South only then could I see evidence of their presence.) And undisguised poverty.
And now, with most of the older generation dead and the strip malling, well, there's very little there there for me. I don't mind so much; my attachments were the people, not the homes. But still, it's become harder to distinguish Georgetown from suburban Connecticut. Dunkin Donuts. Walmart. AutoZone. Starbucks. Sprint. And Myrtle Beach? The arable land, the wealth of the Confederacy turned into golf courses and town houses and Columbia, MD-like new communities sprung whole from the real estate developer's mind.
So I visited my Aunt Johanna, she the last of the Pawley's Island Browns. And we took Lilli to the Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church graveyard where my mother and her kin are buried (and where my mother would not recognize the church building or the congregation that now worships there). And frolicked in the ocean for a day and shared the beach with the new south.
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