Coming home for the holidays and working from my old home — the only one I knew until college — for the rest of the year, I’ve been reconnecting with my hometown and my memories of it. The haze of my early childhood often takes shape in the form of a castle. Demonstration Elementary school felt like that to me as a kid. Besides the downtown YMCA, my twin brother and I spent more time growing up on 11th street south, opened in 1929, the first department to integrate on MUW’s campus, and a place of magic, than any other place outside our house.
The Magnolia Bowl, now overgrown with grass, once felt like a great coliseum. My middle school years, I went to see my older cousin run through tackles from the stands of that bowl, smoked my first cigarette to impress an older girl, saw my brother stalked by a very angry classmate determined to fight him, and ate the trifecta of concessions: popcorn, hamburgers, nachos. The best concessions were at Propst Park. I played terrible baseball there, mostly striking out and waiting for fly balls in the outfield that rarely came. I dropped the few that soared my way. In those years, there were no soccer fields near the Farmer’s Market welcoming visitors into town, so baseball and soccer were shared at the Propst location. I remember spraining my ankle, wearing a long sleeved neon t-shirt as a very aggressive goalie.
Teenage Driving: I spent the free time of high school driving and listening to music. The sense that you could go anywhere listening to your music, a national rite of masculine passage, held power over the Columbus of my youth differently. There was more restlessness to the driving. We drove out to empty farm fields late at night and had long conversations about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do. We all placed excitement outside our home. We were searching for something we assumed we could never find here, or maybe we were posturing. Those opinions are so certain for such uncertain years.
Columbus had soul night Sundays at Skate Zone, the best party in town. Too often, that joy dissolved into fights in the parking lot. That same joy, breaking the monotony of a small town life, by a concert or birthday party at the Columbus Fairgrounds, seemed to follow the rule that delayed pleasure becomes negative quickly. Those fairground parties often genuflected between pleasure and trouble, pleasure and trouble.
People living in houses in every neighborhood in this town raised me. I walked around East Columbus with crews of guys, drove out to New Hope to make out with a girlfriend every other night, hit a home run right after my brother playing baseball on the southside, but lost a couple of fights in front of Charlie Brown gym. My brother and I threw one house party, for our senior year of high school. The whole house and lawn was filled with students from Heritage and CHS, laughing and drinking from red cups together. I remember talking to an older kid from the neighborhood who had graduated and gone off to college, walking from his house on the south side to mine to join the party.
Thoughts of the past are not my forte. Nostalgia feels melancholic because of the inherent sadness of time lost. There’s also innocence to nostalgia. The tragedies of memory can be dulled with time and the small moments of happiness amplified. Maybe I recall my home to understand the importance of community labor. This atmospheric energy of relations that builds or destroys us as individuals; however, we as individuals choose to react to it. I was given a blessed community.
I walk around town now and see children growing up, creating memories to reflect on in their futures while I reflect on their future and my past.
Andrew Colom is a Columbus native now living in Detroit, Michigan.
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