Vic Socotra

14 October 2009

Grabbingham

(Letter Jackets, Old and New)

Unhinged in time as I was, the act of walking into the hotel lobby in the town near Grabbingham where I grew up was not as hard as I had anticipated. I was in jeans and a pullover sweater. It was cold Up North, and I push the Bluesmobile with the driver’s window down most long trips to keep me alert and awake.

I will not lay any of this on the Higgs Boson, the so-called God Particle of Standard Physics, or the alleged attack from the future to shut down the physics experiment in Switzerland that may end life as we know it.

The theory makes sense, in the same loopy way I felt talking to the nice young lady at the check-in desk. “Sorry,” she said. “No smoking anywhere in the hotel”

I asked if I could jump back and forth in the air between the twin beds, if that is what I got rather than the Queen mattress, and she blushed and said it would be OK.

I was confident enough that Life as at least I had known it ,was over anyway. I do worry about the kids, as I am sure my Mom still does.

Dad cares, too, but he is on a long journey of his own that we can only partly share. I was with him, in my way, since there is nothing so disorienting as a long high-speed technical drive peppered with lousy country music and periodic bursts of deep emotion.

Or maybe I am being repetitive.

It was not that cold in Grabbingham, the town where I grew up and went to school. The gas station on Woodward Avenue where I intended to refuel is not there any more, and I wanted to start the morning with a full tank to get back to Washington, where everyone is disoriented as a condition of service.

There are layers of the town that are still a little hard to accommodate all in one reality. I drove slowly past the campus of the Kresge Corporation, which I think is in receivership or something.

S.S. Kresge became Kmart, and this sprawling complex has been slated for demolition for some time. Of course, it looks new to me, since they built it over the farmland where we used to go to sit near a great hole in the soil and drink beer unmolested by the local law. We would throw the empty cans in the bottom when we were done with them.

We called the place “The Holes,” and that was sufficient.

Long before that, my Dad used to drive us out here when the farms were still active and we could buy sweet corn right from the grower.

Like I say, thing are unhinged in time on long drives, and this should have come as no surprise. Corn fields, gas stations and corporate behemoths were stacked under the big mall that occupies the middle of the sprawl.

It is all OK. Everything is fine.

I got my roller bag out of the Bluesmobile, and my letter-jacket, sport coat and crisp Brooks Brothers white shirt. Of course, it is not the original letter jacket. The original came from The Varsity Shop in downtown Grabbingham, and this one was a replica, snowy white on the leather sleeves and bold letter unsullied by use.

Bringing it was an afterthought. I had commissioned a replica, sine it was the best jacket I had ever owned, and discovered after college that no one cared about high school any more, and it was an altogether neutral way of describing my orientation without inviting a fight.

I had fully intended to change, and walked past the lounge off the lobby with trepidation. There was a polite gathering there of people who might have been classmates, men in jackets and ties and women in polite dresses.

I got back to the car to get the bags and called one of my pals who was not coming. He had a bad marriage with good kids and is now married to a super-hot woman a decade younger. “There are a bunch of old farts here,” I said breathlessly. “This is a colossal mistake.”

Well, it turned out to not be quite true, but at that moment, I was indeed out of time, and it looked like I was going to attend the event anyway.

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