The World is Always Burying the Things We Love
There’s going to be a little celebration on the old soccer field I grew up playing on at my high school before the school district tears it up and builds a new school on that spot.
Now, before I get too sentimental (that will come later), let me be realistic: the soccer pitch bordered a cornfield that sloped away from the field of play, so that if someone kicked the ball out of bounds, it was possible the ball would roll on into infinity, delaying the game and causing much consternation from visiting teams. The soccer field was also still made of real grass and dirt, which seems to be out of vogue these days—most schools prefer artificial grass that doesn’t need to be watered and mowed.
But I scored 28 goals my senior year, most of them on that soccer field, and at the time it was a school record. I remember my teammates—Jeremy Martin and Johnny Perella and Steve Funk and Jeremy Smoker and Keith Diller and on and on and on. And I remember the night games under the lights, when that little country high school surrounded by farms seemed to be the center of the universe, the point from which everything else in the world emerged. The hum of the fans, the roar after a goal scored, the high-pitched sound of the brass band.
And now, progress.
It seems the world’s progress is always burying the things we love.
I wrote recently about the birth of our first son, how it happened when we lived in a small English cottage on a 100-acre estate on the outskirts of Wendover village. That English countryside, and that tiny Edenic spot, have maintained a space all their own in my mind, though it’s been 20 years since we lived there. There was our small yard enclosed by hedgerows, and the sheep on the other side of the hedge with their lambs bleating, and the trail at the top of the hill worn three feet deep by centuries of pilgrims who used it to walk to Canterbury. Maile used to walk that trail into town to buy groceries.
There was the estate home at the top of the hill, a beautiful old stone building with multiple chimneys and garages and an expansive garden. And in that house lived our friends, John and Vicki Walker, a couple who took us into their lives and treated us like their children, loaning us their Peugeot when we first arrived and inviting us up to the house for Christmas and Boxing Day parties and insisting we attend their New Year’s Day clay pigeon shoots.
I heard recently the entire estate is being torn down, all the buildings, including our little cottage and hedgerows and narrow lane. Bulldozed. The pastures leveled. All so a high-speed rail can connect to London.
It seems the world’s progress is always burying the things we love most.
There are a few square acres of green space in the city, just back the alleyway from our old place on 41 West James Street. It’s being developed, turned into shops and apartments.
The wide open green space at our alma mater where I stopped to tie my shoe so that Maile would catch up to me and I could talk to her for the first time? That place is now a building (albeit one that houses English classes, so I guess that’s a mark in its favor).
It can, if I’m not careful, lead me to ask, What’s the point? What can we do in a world that seems intent on obliterating the old green spaces, the places we’ve loved, the precise spots on Earth that mean the most to us?
This is going to sound cheesy. Maybe it is cheesy. But for me, this is the answer to what we do in a world that seems intent on burying the things we love: we keep telling the stories about them.
These places live on in the stories we tell each other. In the stories we tell ourselves. In the memories and recollections we have and share over dinner or coffee or a late-night drink.
No one can ever take away from me that moment when I stopped to tie my shoe or the pacing Maile did around the garden when lived in England and Cade’s birth was imminent. I have told the stories many times of the meals we ate up at the estate house and the time we shot clay pigeons as the morning fog snaked through the valley. I hope my children will remember, for a long time, how we went sledding in that green space behind 41 W James Street, or how we took Winnie back there when she was just a puppy.
It’s the stories that bring it all back to us. The world can never bury the stories. Maybe that’s why it’s so important we keep telling them.
Yes, Shawn, thats how we keep it alive. Several years ago, my older brother (76) and I (73) went back to tramp what we called “the gully”. We recalled what we called “the mountains to the moon” and “ the foxholes”. The stream that was at the vertex is barely running. We used to stand on a fallen tree and drop big rocks to stun a catfish. Our friends below brought buckets and would catch the stunned fish. We would then tramp home and throw them one at a time wriggling on to the grass. My brother and the boys would take their boyscout hatchets and behead them! They would scale them and the moms would freeze them or fry them up that night. The tales of the foxholes and mountains to the moon still delight our grandchildren. I have a group of tales that revolves around a stuffed bear named Seersy ( because of his seersucker overalls). Seersy knew the gully well. Just the other day one of my Godsons (10y.o.) called me and said, “ Nanny, tell me a Seersy story.” Through the years, I inserted Seersy into adventures he never had, but that I, as an older child who has retired Seersy to a bookshelf of much loved toys did. We can never underestimate the importance of keeping those memories alive in the oral tradition. But it’s so wonderful that you write as well! Glad the Biblical authors did too. It’s always a pleasure to read your books and your “shorts”