Reflections on coming home
I’m back in the Open Eye Café, in my hometown of Chapel Hill. The teeny coffeshop I once knew has expanded and swallowed the neighboring furniture shop, creating a large, clean, well-lighted space. There are certain spaces like this, of rapid change, that momentarily shock me. Part of me wants to believe that all of the places here that have played a special role in my life will be frozen in time. And yet of course the town keeps changing. New subdivisions sprout up and so alter an intersection that I drive, aimless, until I see one of the few landmarks I still recognize.
And of course the version of town that I know is just an arbitrary slice of a continuum of change. I’ve been reading John Ehle’s excellent history of the Chapel Hill civil rights movement, The Free Men. It’s like hearing a genteel southern gentlemen tell a story over a tall bourbon. Some aspects of the town he describes make perfect sense to me, somewhere deep in my bones. There is a prevailing sense among the conservative citizens of North Carolina that “college is a dangerous time of life and Chapel Hill a dangerous place, a seedbed of new ideas.” We Chapel Hillians like it that way, are perhaps a bit arrogant because of our belief that something good can come from this place. However, the small village mentality of Chapel Hill that Ehle describes is gone, replaced by an economic dynamism and a fascination with the fictional metropolis that is the Triangle.
And I too am different. The streets of Chapel Hill seem monstrously large after the cramped roads of Boston, the neighborhood scarily empty at night. I have become, despite my best intentions, an urbanite. Things that once seemed special in Chapel Hill now seem mundanely suburban. The only thing that is constant over time is my bond with my family. On that front, I’m luckier than many Americans, whose families are scattered all over the place: at least I belong here, and know I will always have shelter here.
And of course the version of town that I know is just an arbitrary slice of a continuum of change. I’ve been reading John Ehle’s excellent history of the Chapel Hill civil rights movement, The Free Men. It’s like hearing a genteel southern gentlemen tell a story over a tall bourbon. Some aspects of the town he describes make perfect sense to me, somewhere deep in my bones. There is a prevailing sense among the conservative citizens of North Carolina that “college is a dangerous time of life and Chapel Hill a dangerous place, a seedbed of new ideas.” We Chapel Hillians like it that way, are perhaps a bit arrogant because of our belief that something good can come from this place. However, the small village mentality of Chapel Hill that Ehle describes is gone, replaced by an economic dynamism and a fascination with the fictional metropolis that is the Triangle.
And I too am different. The streets of Chapel Hill seem monstrously large after the cramped roads of Boston, the neighborhood scarily empty at night. I have become, despite my best intentions, an urbanite. Things that once seemed special in Chapel Hill now seem mundanely suburban. The only thing that is constant over time is my bond with my family. On that front, I’m luckier than many Americans, whose families are scattered all over the place: at least I belong here, and know I will always have shelter here.
