HOMETOWN Part 1 of 4 Parts

"HOMETOWN" is written by guest author Tim Landy, a freelance writer and adjunct professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, Fayette Campus. He founded the former Foothills Writers Group in Mt. Pleasant, PA. This is a biographical story of his hometown, Mt. Pleasant, PA., and his experience with heart problems. This piece is filed in the category BW Visitor Writings.

Home is that place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.   ---Robert Frost

   As I pull my Civic into a spot in front of Levin’s Furniture on West Main, the sky over the eastern foothills is ripening into deep huckleberry.   The silver hood shimmers after a quick wash, catching the ethereal pink of mercury-vapor street lamps and the bright red storefront signs.   Stepping into the street, I turn and lock the door.  The town is safe but not that safe.  By 8 p.m. Mt. Pleasant has settled down, though these days I never think of it as being revved up.

   When I was a boy, Main Street buzzed with activity--people crisscrossing the streets; people popping in and out of George and Cunningham Hardware, Woolworth’s, McCrory’s, Marne’s Market, Candyland, and the Coffeepot restaurants; people driving to work; people driving home from work.  People everywhere.  This was before the locals were lured away by the malls or more recently by the glittering archipelago of chain stores, fast-food restaurants, banks, and other icons of American progress a mile south of town.  Super-Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Wendy’s, Arby’s, Pizza Hut, two outpatient medical centers, three shopping plazas, and knots of highway rise out of fields where wheat and oats and corn once grew.

   Tonight a few people pass quietly in front of George and Cunningham, a hardware store.  They nod and smile briefly at one another.

   Even before I graduated from Connellsville High School, I knew that I wanted to work at there.  I had always found hardware stores fascinating, mostly the old kind with merchandise stuck in every available nook, but I especially loved George and Cunningham.  I loved the smell of paint thinner, cleaning supplies, and mothballs, and I loved the oily, metallic odor of nuts and bolts.  I loved the stacks of plastic and galvanized buckets, the bins filled with sponges, the wall racks filled with mops and red-handled brooms.  I loved the displays of light fixtures, the long shelves filled with every imaginable item for house, garage, and farm—silver wrenches, tubes of thumbtacks, rolls of screen wire, lawn mowers and lawn rakes, sprinkling cans.  I loved this store and I loved the people who worked here and shopped here. Working here for eight years as stock boy and then clerk, I learned about the town–I learned about these people and I learned to love these people, even the “nut cases,” as some used to call them.

   In the alley below the store, some kids run back and forth playing tag.  Their laughter punctuates the quiet.  Not wanting to disturb their game, I decide to take another route.  The late-April breeze picks up, so I zip up my hooded sweatshirt.  I glance back and smile, wishing they’d invite me to join in.

  I have learned to follow the flow, the logic, of the peripatetic life—Go where the road and heart and mind lead.  What starts as a well-planned tour, a recipe for a good time, soon turns into a free-for-all improvisation.  This evening’s selection illustrates my idea of how the universe operates: a combination of preexisting, predetermined elements we discover, and others we invent along the way.  I step into the darkening world before me–the well-known, well-worn network of streets and alleys and sidewalks–and begin to whip up my own itinerary.  I play my own variation on a familiar theme.

Return tomorrow night for Part 2 of Hometown.