Sentence Starter #14: My Hometown

[VerseD]

I may have changed. It's hard to gauge.
Time won't account for how I've aged.
Would I could tie your lying tongue,
Who says that leaving keeps you young.
--Joanna Newsom

If you're done with finals, please take heed. You have 300 words to describe your hometown -- the people, the feel, the taste of the air, the color of the sky, the big events, what has changed, what stands out, what blends in. It's always good to practice writing what you know or half remember.

Back in my hometown.

[evilgoodwin]

Back in my hometown. I loathe this place. Not much to do there except develop a meth addiction or a drinking problem. I’m being cynical, of course. Having people tell you why you’re going to Hell when you die can do that to you. I recently found out that an old teacher of mine asked my Mom if I still had a drug problem, which was interesting since I never had one. She just assumed because of my apathy and long hair. Great lady, that one. There were others, too, but oh well. Some people want to pretend life is a bad high school movie.

It wasn’t always bad, though. It was fun as a kid there. Had some good friends at the time. Lots of festivals. Small towns have festivals every few months because of the lack of full-time entertainment options. We had a nice art festival, an annual city-wide homecoming event, and something called a “rattlesnake roundup.” High school football was huge, too. The entire community would come to watch every game. It was the only thing to do on Friday, and probably still is. I don’t think they ever got a bar there. They were a dry city for ages, but they finally overturned that particular annoyance.

The entire town shuts down at night, though there was a 24-hour breakfast place there. Think IHOP, but less classy. Yes. Less classy. But it was popular. Where do you think everyone went after football games? Teachers, students, and entire families would be there munching on pancakes and omelets (made with real egg, none of that instant crap) at all hours of the night. Most of the outcasts from school would head there to chain-smoke and drink coffee during the summer.

I miss those days, but there were reasons I moved, never to return.

[VerseD]

In summary, my general response to a difficult exercise is to write way too much.

Back in my hometown: she straddles the highway north like parted thighs: a well-kept desolation of mummified gardens and stratified neighborhoods, a mistress of greater cities, pristine, uncomfortable, and far too young. The western flank is called the downtown, where the wide sidewalks run in front of the single-storied civic buildings, the brick library, the clean interior of the Christian bookstore, the ranks of bric-a-brac on the display shelves of Parson’s pharmacy; and on 1st Street, running along the highway, there are the jaundiced windows of Tim’s Bar, the bridal white of the Chinese dry cleaner, and the jailhouse gate of the Canby liquor store, which on Sundays is the only place selling spirits in the state of Oregon. There is the tavern where the rodeo jockeys go to drink, when the rodeo is town, and the empty field where the county fair is pitched in the summers. It is a town where life flickers at certain moments, that is otherwise laden with a dull monotony of routine.

There are stores along the transverse line of the highway that could only exist in this outer limit of urban America, not for what they stock but for how they appear: lined with grit and determination and an indecorous frontier spirit, as on the sweated and grimed face of a laborer. “Canby Mufflers” is painted in white across the ash-smeared slate wall of a house, and Wu’s Chinese Kitchen looks like a house boat beached, abandoned, and recently reoccupied. The brightly colored sign matched with the dismal barber shop canopy that juts off the slanted roof conjures, inexplicably, the image of fried cubes of chicken swamped in the red syrup of sweet and sour sauce, fried rice, and the greasy brown MSG-glittering morass that is American Chinese cuisine. Even the chain stalls have their peculiarities: the BurgerVille with an olive green Huey chopper out front, mounted on a half-arc of black steel, and the Blockbuster Video installed in the old railway station, where no train has stopped for a generation. The freight trains lumber steadily on, and those engines hauling cars of passengers barrel through, as if even a lingering glance over the town is a nauseous proposition to those not bound here.

It is an evening in late spring, still gray and miserably wet, and the commuters pull in past this commerce towards home. There are churches on every corner. Companies of Mexicans ride their rusted secondhand bikes in the opposite direction, coming back from the fields. Their denim jackets are soaked, their faces grim with cold and exhaustion, and gloves stick out of their back pockets. Homecoming offers no relief, no promise of warmth or love: they live eight to a room in squalid tenements on the east end of town, between the supermarkets and the strip mall parking lots. They ride bicycles because it is impossible to get a driver’s license. They send their pay home to their families, endure everything for their families, and forget how to laugh. The commuters pass them without a thought.

Out near the dahlia fields on the western end are the nicest neighborhoods, solitary and still, pale and clean, like young mistresses awaiting the men who keep them in such idle and purposeless comfort. The houses come in rows, identical—a garage door or two, a pair of indecorous pillars to hold a high awning, a closed door with a factory print design carved on the front, curtains in the window, all the same, the same, the same, and as lifeless and flat as the hollow fronts of a Hollywood studio town.

In the evening, between the showers of rain, the frogs strike up a symphony from the dahlia fields and the marshes along the river. A dog barks and is silenced. The roar of an engine down the highway is too occasional to be mistaken for waves or anything beautiful. All is quiet, over a quiet meal, the lamp lights and the lightning of the television glowing out from every living room, and all is drenched in a kind of moribund expectancy, a tumescent dread gone benign and forgotten. It feels like autumn, even in the spring.

The quickest way out of Canby is not on the vertical line of the highway, but along the western road, through the lanes of cookie cutter households to Knight’s Bridge, which glides down across the river from the steep bluff on which the town is settled to the lower bank and a wide plain. The woodland is rank and thick, and ivy grows up the tree trunks in a jungle gesture. The gray bank of the river sparkles with beer bottles. The road runs strait on between the farms: little cottages behind rows of hedges and willows, the rusted skeleton of a tractor sunk between the reeds of a fallow field, the long white barns of the Harris Dairy Farm. To the right there is a camp for rescued animals, where the scrawny beasts huddle around troughs of rotten wood, as diverse a cast as a children’s book version of the Ark, with pairs of mules, horses, and some camels saved from the sad parking lot petting zoo of a Toys-R-Us. The sky is gray as ashes, streaked with charcoal, and a yellowing gash on the western horizon, gleaming between the gowns of the young pines, marks the setting of the sun.

The road bends near the plant nursery in a sharp right angle, where every year some drunk in a pickup goes careening off into the muddy spoil. Inside the curve and behind a chain link fence, potted plants are arrayed in martial ranks suggestive of dominoes and fascism, and the brassy greenhouse pens full of plants remind the passerby of the total subjugation of the natural world by man. The traffic light is green at the top of the arcing pole; the road curves on, past the sprawling plain of the airport, the tin roof hanger and the old white tower, and on to meet at the end the perpetual motion and indecipherable life of the Interstate. It is night now, and the streams form a two-tone ribbon, red and white, north and south, choiceless and narrow as a compass.

[Serapth]

My home town was a bastion of religious and racial tolerance. An innocent place removed from the hard reality of the greater world. Then again, this may be because everyone was a white Baptist, its hard to say.

We had a murder once, it occurred 108 years ago and everybody still knew about it. I suppose this spoke both to the level of crime to which we were accustomed and the abundance of idle gossips dying for some awful to happen. It never did. Nor in fact did anything great. So we contented ourselves with stories of a murder a full century old. Perhaps most ironic of all, both the murderer and the murdered were visitors to our sleepy town.

As to the town itself I suppose the most accurate term for it would be parasitic. You know those one traffic light towns you encounter in increasing frequency as you drive closer to a big city? We were one of those. Cheaper. Safer. Duller. A bargain in the eyes of most parents just starting a family. Or for those awaiting the end. This may explain the disproportionate number of daycares, old age and funeral homes that always seemed to be sprouting up.

Yet it wasn't all bad. Come Christmas the decorations were brought out and hung from the lamps on main street. The same decorations hang today and may have been hung 108 years ago. There is something to be said of tradition. When Halloween came, parents used threats of razors in the candy as an excuse to steal from their children, not out of any actual fear.

Now I live in a much bigger city, with so very much more to do. Yet every ounce of me knows where home is and always will. Say did I ever tell you about the murder?

[Serapth]

In summary, my general response to a difficult exercise is to write way too much.

Back in my hometown: she straddles the highway north like parted thighs: a well-kept desolation of mummified gardens and stratified neighborhoods, a mistress of greater cities, pristine, uncomfortable, and far too young. The western flank is called the downtown, where the wide sidewalks run in front of the single-storied civic buildings, the brick library, the clean interior of the Christian bookstore, the ranks of bric-a-brac on the display shelves of Parson’s pharmacy; and on 1st Street, running along the highway, there are the jaundiced windows of Tim’s Bar, the bridal white of the Chinese dry cleaner, and the jailhouse gate of the Canby liquor store, which on Sundays is the only place selling spirits in the state of Oregon. There is the tavern where the rodeo jockeys go to drink, when the rodeo is town, and the empty field where the county fair is pitched in the summers. It is a town where life flickers at certain moments, that is otherwise laden with a dull monotony of routine.

There are stores along the transverse line of the highway that could only exist in this outer limit of urban America, not for what they stock but for how they appear: lined with grit and determination and an indecorous frontier spirit, as on the sweated and grimed face of a laborer. “Canby Mufflers” is painted in white across the ash-smeared slate wall of a house, and Wu’s Chinese Kitchen looks like a house boat beached, abandoned, and recently reoccupied. The brightly colored sign matched with the dismal barber shop canopy that juts off the slanted roof conjures, inexplicably, the image of fried cubes of chicken swamped in the red syrup of sweet and sour sauce, fried rice, and the greasy brown MSG-glittering morass that is American Chinese cuisine. Even the chain stalls have their peculiarities: the BurgerVille with an olive green Huey chopper out front, mounted on a half-arc of black steel, and the Blockbuster Video installed in the old railway station, where no train has stopped for a generation. The freight trains lumber steadily on, and those engines hauling cars of passengers barrel through, as if even a lingering glance over the town is a nauseous proposition to those not bound here.

It is an evening in late spring, still gray and miserably wet, and the commuters pull in past this commerce towards home. There are churches on every corner. Companies of Mexicans ride their rusted secondhand bikes in the opposite direction, coming back from the fields. Their denim jackets are soaked, their faces grim with cold and exhaustion, and gloves stick out of their back pockets. Homecoming offers no relief, no promise of warmth or love: they live eight to a room in squalid tenements on the east end of town, between the supermarkets and the strip mall parking lots. They ride bicycles because it is impossible to get a driver’s license. They send their pay home to their families, endure everything for their families, and forget how to laugh. The commuters pass them without a thought.

Out near the dahlia fields on the western end are the nicest neighborhoods, solitary and still, pale and clean, like young mistresses awaiting the men who keep them in such idle and purposeless comfort. The houses come in rows, identical—a garage door or two, a pair of indecorous pillars to hold a high awning, a closed door with a factory print design carved on the front, curtains in the window, all the same, the same, the same, and as lifeless and flat as the hollow fronts of a Hollywood studio town.

In the evening, between the showers of rain, the frogs strike up a symphony from the dahlia fields and the marshes along the river. A dog barks and is silenced. The roar of an engine down the highway is too occasional to be mistaken for waves or anything beautiful. All is quiet, over a quiet meal, the lamp lights and the lightning of the television glowing out from every living room, and all is drenched in a kind of moribund expectancy, a tumescent dread gone benign and forgotten. It feels like autumn, even in the spring.

The quickest way out of Canby is not on the vertical line of the highway, but along the western road, through the lanes of cookie cutter households to Knight’s Bridge, which glides down across the river from the steep bluff on which the town is settled to the lower bank and a wide plain. The woodland is rank and thick, and ivy grows up the tree trunks in a jungle gesture. The gray bank of the river sparkles with beer bottles. The road runs strait on between the farms: little cottages behind rows of hedges and willows, the rusted skeleton of a tractor sunk between the reeds of a fallow field, the long white barns of the Harris Dairy Farm. To the right there is a camp for rescued animals, where the scrawny beasts huddle around troughs of rotten wood, as diverse a cast as a children’s book version of the Ark, with pairs of mules, horses, and some camels saved from the sad parking lot petting zoo of a Toys-R-Us. The sky is gray as ashes, streaked with charcoal, and a yellowing gash on the western horizon, gleaming between the gowns of the young pines, marks the setting of the sun.

The road bends near the plant nursery in a sharp right angle, where every year some drunk in a pickup goes careening off into the muddy spoil. Inside the curve and behind a chain link fence, potted plants are arrayed in martial ranks suggestive of dominoes and fascism, and the brassy greenhouse pens full of plants remind the passerby of the total subjugation of the natural world by man. The traffic light is green at the top of the arcing pole; the road curves on, past the sprawling plain of the airport, the tin roof hanger and the old white tower, and on to meet at the end the perpetual motion and indecipherable life of the Interstate. It is night now, and the streams form a two-tone ribbon, red and white, north and south, choiceless and narrow as a compass.

You know you're over your own 300 word target by like 730, right? :)

[VerseD]

The word count is a suggestion! I just have to abandon my expectation that anyone will read my own offering.