My Hometown
“Son take a good look around
This is your hometown”
Jill said she doesn’t have a reason to come back here. And that’s when it occurred to me, this could be my last time visiting Fairfield, CT. I used to tell Felice to bury me here, but I’ve been in California for nearly fifty years now, that doesn’t make sense, but we were here for the unveiling of my mother’s headstone, normally done a year after burial, but because of Covid…
The first thing I noticed was the humidity. I’m not complaining about it, just saying you don’t need a jacket at night. Even in the San Fernando Valley you need a jacket at night during the summer, a sweatshirt last week at the Neil Young concert in the Cahuenga Pass. Furthermore, it just turned summer in L.A., June had gloom, there was no sun for at least half the day and the temperatures never climbed out of the seventies, but on the east coast, summer has already begun.
That’s what I realized driving on the CT Turnpike. It was summer now, and then it would be fall, winter, spring and then summer again. There are seasons in Southern California, no one goes to the beach in December except for hard core surfers, but on the east coast it’s different. You can feel summer coming and you want to make the most of it, because it won’t be long before it’s gone.
Hot town, summer in the city, you forget if you don’t live back here anymore. I’ll let you in on another secret, you don’t feel like you’ll ever get old, ever die on the west coast. Life is endless, until it’s over. But in Connecticut…
Yesterday we went out for Pepe’s pizza. It’s a tradition. And then I drove around in the rental car to my old haunts. First the beach in Fairfield, and then to Seaside Park in Bridgeport. And that’s where I saw the field where we used to play softball every Sunday, for years and years, it was organized by the JCC. After Sunday school, I’d get my glove and my father would ferry me down there and… Even though I’d driven around Seaside Park with my mother not that long ago, somehow I hadn’t been in exactly the same spot. We played the game over fifty years ago. I’m not sure the younger generation is dedicated to the ball and the bat, but that was everything to us back in the sixties.
And then I went in search of my father’s liquor store. He’d sold it in the late seventies or early eighties. But the guy didn’t make the payments and my dad repossessed the building and it sat empty until my mother donated it to the church.
Not that I was sure exactly where it was. The problem is the greenery. You can’t see anything anymore, everything is hidden. And I got off at the wrong exit and decided to go one more…
And there it was.
The church had sold it to the automotive repair shop next door, and now it was their office. And the owners came out and interrogated me, what was I doing there on a Saturday afternoon? And then I explained and they left me alone with my thoughts and…
My father wanted to be in commercial real estate. But he had no money. So he decided to open a liquor store. The first one lasted only a couple of years, his mother worked there, before she lost both legs to diabetes, and then he opened the Bay Package Store right by the Lordship exit on I-95 and…
I was stunned how little the building was. And my mind drifted back. And I thought about how my dad brought up three kids on that store. How he bought an ice machine and had to refill it during holidays because it couldn’t make ice quickly enough. That was my father’s job.
Until he became a real estate appraiser and broke into the next economic class when they condemned property for the Route 8 connector, affectionately called “The Morris Lefsetz Memorial Highway,” and not only by our family. My dad made a lot of money for lawyers and their clients, a lot more than he made, and they were grateful.
And I drove up to Aspetuck Farms for an apple. And then down Black Rock Turnpike across the lake and up the hill to my first alma mater, Fairfield Woods. Now a middle school, but in my day an elementary and junior high school. It was opened in 1951. Brand new back then. And it doesn’t look like they’ve put in a dollar since. The concrete has faded, as have the bricks, what was once young is now old, just like me.
And then I drove down Farist Road to our old house and…
I just about missed it.
It was confusing. The greenery. And then I saw the street sign for Coral Drive and I realized I’d just passed our old house, how could that be?
And I looked up and there was a huge tree in the front yard that I don’t even remember and the hill I hid behind in the front yard when I ran away looked so short and on one hand I wanted to knock on the door and go inside, but I didn’t think I could handle it. Meanwhile, the residents were unloading groceries and I was afraid they would see me staring so…
I drove around the block.
And the same thing happened. I’d drive right by houses my friends lived in. I’d be looking for them and I’d already passed them. It was like someone shrunk the neighborhood down to 3/4 size. I saw where the Levys lived. And the Gallaghers. And the Romes. And the people who hosted a first grade birthday party and had a relative perform tricks and I called out the black thread, it was easily visible, and I was creeped out. Because it was me. And I’m still me, yet different. If you don’t change as you grow up your life will be very tough. You need to gain insight, self-knowledge, or else you’re an adolescent buffoon repeating the mistakes of the past, not realizing everybody is rolling their eyes when you speak.
And after passing by my house again I drove down Coral to Bobby Hickey’s house, where we used to ski in the backyard. If there was a vertical drop of ten feet I’d be amazed, certainly not fifteen, the hill was so short, but that’s where it all began.
And then by my high school, which looks pretty similar but is different, they changed mascots, wiped out all of that history. But it was so long ago.
And on the drive back to the hotel I passed houses I wouldn’t want to live in and…
Almost all of the buildings were still there, but the businesses were different. I guess I expected them to be the same, to be passed down through the generations, but really they were all just toeholds, a way to get ahead for those who’d survived the war. That was the generation. It built my town. Every neighborhood had kids. We’d ride our bikes and roam in packs and our parents wouldn’t know where we were and they wouldn’t care. Not that anybody remembers.
And today we went to the cemetery. My mother never went to visit my father there, but now she’s lying right next to him. And as I looked around, I saw the parents of my old friends. That generation is almost fully done.
Bridgeport, CT is heavily populated by Italians. So I saw more pizza joints than I’ve ever seen before, more than I grew up with. And there’s an arena and an amphitheater and you can even take the train to the show but downtown Bridgeport, adjacent to the venues, is still bombed out. My father kept saying it would come back, but it hasn’t.
So tomorrow I’m out of here. Not a minute too soon. I understand the east coast, I lived it, but I escaped it.
Kind of like the Cantor who performed the ceremony. He’d been an engineer, his father told him religion was not a good way to pay the bills. But after twenty years he pivoted and has never been happier, even though he’s now not that far from retirement. And he would have talked to me all day, I could have talked to him all day. That’s the difference between the east coast and the west, the people. East coast people are verbal. Sure, what you own is important. But not as much as where you went to school and whether you can hold up your end of a conversation. It’s the intelligentsia. But ultimately it’s emotional death. You’ve got your place in the firmament and can’t try to be something different, you’ll be denigrated, you have to go somewhere else for that.
No one cares who I am in Southern California. And no one asks me where I went to college, never mind what I got on my SATs. That’s all irrelevant. You make your own life. And you can ring a bell that can’t be rung on the east coast, at least not in the suburbs. The goal isn’t to set the world on fire back here. You find your place in the landscape and stay there. I want no part of that.
So I’m not holding on to yesterday.
Then again, my generation will be the next one in the ground.
It’s the way of the world.
But it’s very weird.
My parents’ parents were born in the old country. They came to America for a better life. It wasn’t about emotional fulfillment, it was about putting bread on the table. And they paved the way for us. Drove us hard to achieve. So we could live out our dreams, be who we wanted to be. But that turned out to be who they wanted us to be. And it was totally different from today. Everybody didn’t plan on going to graduate school, people drifted and found their place in society. They figured they’d have enough money to make it work and then the eighties came along and either you partook in the greed or were left behind. And now our kids are straighter than we were. They know how hard life is. They want a good job. They want what our parents wanted for us.
The world has changed since I grew up. Now nobody dominates, there is no center, all we’ve got is little groups. No one is in control. Facts don’t matter. And when you leave home and are too busy to read the news you realize there’s a whole ‘nother life out there. Like the one in Fairfield.
That’s not the life I want.
I want a bigger playing field. I need to be at the center. I want to make a difference, put a dent in the universe. And for that you have to leave the suburbs. And I did.
