I just got back from my hometown. When you haven't been home for 16 years, and you're the least bit introspective, you expect various and sundry epiphanic moments. The problem with expecting them is that they are predetermined to a degree, and influenced by years of gathering nostalgia, and nostalgia is notorious for it's sepia saturation filter. The traumatic times aren't forgotten, but they are appropriated to your attempts to make sense of your life, a tone or direction to the narrative of you.
So intellectual, emotional honesty can be elusive, or at least, if, as I said, you are the least bit, or as in my case, overly introspective.
But Duncan, Oklahoma is, naturally smaller, and also flatter than I remember.
Hills as landmarks was a sometimes misleading method of navigation.
My memory seemed to adopt the same effect as binoculars, as when you raise the glasses to your eyes to examine a distant hill and find it dramatically steeper.
This is disappointing.
It also makes me wonder what a West Kansan prodigal experiences upon his arrival back home.
That particular area of Oklahoma, though, is unique. In fact, you leave the exact terrain and flora to which I refer by traveling 30 miles in any direction. The post and blackjack oaks that I knew were small even as a boy seem to lose their stark peculiarity toward Lawton, or Texas.
The hills are the same. They seem deliberately miniaturized, like a 1:2 scale model of the greater Great Plains.
I did some walking in the fields, remembering sharp smells of weeds and soil. In vain I looked for the specific weed that often held a small ball of foam in the crook of trunk and branch that was home to an even smaller caterpillar. I remembered trying to duplicate this phenomenon by spitting on many a weed, only to see it drip away, revealing no caterpillar.
I heard bluejays and crows predominate the fowl of the air. Wished it was night long ago before the whippoorwills vanished, leaving a vacuum of audial lonesomeness against the white noise of crickets and tree frogs, like percussion with no melody.
I drove through a town whose streets were shortened and whose houses were subtracted from my bigger memory.
Memorially, downtown was an almost endless parade of individual storefronts, many of which I remember walking past in the dead of night, with my Dad on his downtown security route.
Now, as I drove slowly by, irritably aware of the irritated drivers behind me, I realized that all my remembered significance would pass by in a disinterested blur for anyone who wasn't born here or who never moved.
The library, shrouded in my remembrances as a venerable, benevolently haunted edifice with aisles as distinct and definitive as the Great Wall of China, delineating children's fiction from inscrutable reference tomes, physically haunted by an elderly bald man with a waxed handlebar mustache against which all handlebar mustaches I have ever seen are measured, is now an insurance agency. Ironically, it houses the agency that once resided in the much larger building out on Highway 81 that now hosts the library. Happily, it seems that apparently books have multiplied in an inverse proportion to insurance agents.
