thurs 4 september 08

 

i write in turners falls again today, as i did yesterday. on the bus over i couldn't stop crying, but such things happen often. i was thinking about the various buildings and streets, and that for 22 years they were JUST buildings and streets, where we did this or that, my child and i, my animals and i, various other people sometimes. they were just buildings and streets in towns that i never found very welcoming, or stimulating in any positive way, or friendly in more than a superficial, cotton-candy kind of way. i was always to one degree or another an outsider, no matter how long i lived here. in the beginning it was so blatant: were you born here? no? immediate disinterest. the same with many other questions: are you polish? no. are you catholic? no. where do you work? the university. every answer i gave was wrong. every answer deserved a snotty look and a cold shoulder, and most of those people who asked those hundreds of questions in my first two years here never spoke to me again. some of the bank tellers never smiled at me for five whole years. it took that long to be accepted even a tiny bit. many other people i've met from outside have had this same complaint about turners and greenfield, and have left. and yet, other outsiders come here and have a very different experience, and stay. i stayed, but not because i liked it here or because anyone here much liked me. there were other reasons.

 

but i was thinking on the bus about the other choice i could have made in 1985. instead of coming to umass for a masters or two, i could have stayed where i was, done a quick bachelors and masters in english in four years. i ended up at umass longer than four years, anyway. so what if i'd stayed where i was. everything that was painful about this county would not have happened. and then the worst, the sucking away of my life by big baboons and being made a worm, would also most likely never have happened. franklin county has indeed, in a much different way than i ever expected, been the death of me. but i did NOT stay where i was in 1985, and i didn't change my field to english, and the baboons who could have behaved morally and legally did not, and so the finis.

 

i have cried rivers of tears since march 11, and yet not nearly enough for everything that i've lost and every abuse i've endured. there are rivers left. but i don't want to live long enough to cry them all. some of them, perhaps, but not all.

 

they have come together, greenfield and turners, in an astounding way over the last four or five days. the monied and the struggling, the old and the babies, the educated and the dropouts; all social strata have come out to help me in a way i can't elucidate, but it has been both an amazing and a bitter thing to see. i've heard so much superficial crap about community in my 22 years here, but in the last week, community has HAPPENED. real community, not just lip service. people working together who six months ago would not even have spoken to each other. saturday i saw turners falls become a place you only see in movies: a place of cooperation and support  and small-town loyalty. i was proud of turners, proud to say i had lived here, for the first time. they did as well as greenfield has done, and they did it with humor and odds and ends and a quirky, small-town kind of grace. it is the best memory i have of turners in 22 years.

 

what these two towns have done and have become over the last six months is indeed an amazing change from what i've previously known them to be. and they have done these things, at least partly, for me. it IS amazing. and bitter too, because it comes too late. and because i was still left isolated and alone through all of it, kept at a distance with no comfort or inclusion. kept aside like a very unusual but frightening bird that people wanted to SEE, but have no interaction with, no bond.

 

an exotic, scary bird. a worm. an autistic, atheistic, marxist, non-conformist with "too many" animals. no place to fit. the proverbial square peg trying to strain into a round hole. this bird wants to fly her last strength and die over the sea she grew up in. this worm wants to lie in the sun until its moisture is all sun-sucked and it gives up its ghost. this peg wants a great hammer to shatter it to splinters. no one can, or ever could, understand what i had with the animals. how much like them i am. how much like them i function. how real and unique and precious they were to me as individuals, the way neurotypical humans are to each other. how my desire to live depended on living with them, these friends who were mostly born to me, and with me all their lives, and how it was my duty and my desire and my joy to see each aging one of them in their turn to the end of their days. no one understood it, or wanted to. certainly not the purple-assed baboons.

 

bitter the irony that has created this new community: it came about because of evil. that is one of the rivers of tears that i cry, that it all came about only when evil became a tumor too large to keep ignoring. it didn't come as the result of some epiphany that we are NOT really a community and need to become one, or from any other deep spiritual or moral impetus. it came about because the tumor got too big to shut our eyes to anymore. if the tumor were excised tomorrow, would this NEW community remain, or simply dissolve again? i don't know, and i don't want to be AROUND to know. but i hope so. i hope this evil that no community wants or deserves has taught people something about how fragile we all are, how much we need the solidity of a REAL community. how much i and others needed it all these last 22 years.