Many years ago we had a tenant who had a bumper sticker on the back of her old white four door Subaru sedan that read, “The Only Constant Is Change.” I liked that tenant, Sarah was her name, a grad student at the time, and I’d invariably chuckle seeing that thing as I walked up Warren Street toward our place. These kids, I’d think sort of lovingly, with their bits of not-so-hard earned wisdom glued to the backs of their cars.
For some reason I thought of that car, and of that bumper sticker, and of Sarah and of that old house that’s been bought and sold a few times since I lived there, yesterday late afternoon as I rolled Evie and Riley down the driveway and out onto the streets of my hometown for a walk. Yeah, a lot of change since those days. A lot of change, period. I’m now something of an exercise addict, in better shape now at forty-four than I was then at thirty-two. I needed a fix and my legs felt sore after a grueling workout on the spin bike the day before, too sore for another session of pedaling, so I asked the little ones if they cared for a trip in the stroller. Riley went straight for his sneakers and his fleece pullover, but Evie balked. I had to resort to bribery to get her to come along, had to promise an ice cream cone at Stewart’s on the way home, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Yeah, Sarah had it right after all, the only constant is change, it seemed only moments had passed that I’d wheel around my two youngest with ease around these streets, and they seemed light as a feather, but that was two years ago, and a lot has changed, and nothing changes faster than a family full of young kids, and now they weigh in at over a hundred and thirty pounds between the two of them, and pushing them around takes a lot more effort than it did a few blinks of an eyelash ago.
I pushed them west down Grand Street, feeling yesterday’s bike-induced burn in my legs within a few yards of the driveway, the sun, having disappeared for three days of rain now reappearing just in time to set in front of us. I had a route mapped out in my head but then we heard the wail of a freight train whistle nearby and Evie and Riley shouted out that they wanted to see the train, so I took a quick unplanned right, small change, across Fifth and over toward the remnants of what was once one of the largest rail yards in the Eastern United States but is now nothing more than a couple of tracks surrounded by empty brick warehouses and overgrown brush.
“Run, Dad, run!” Evie exhorted; she didn’t want to miss the train. I couldn’t run, not with my legs aching and burning and all that seemingly just-found new weight in the stroller. I walked as fast as I could, panting after a block or two. We made it over in time to catch the last half of the train, and both of them expressed satisfaction. I thought back to a couple of years ago, and of how they would have howled in protest at having missed the whole thing, unable then to make peace with unmet expectations. They’ve grown.
I pushed them on out down the service road that runs for a mile or so into where the rail yards once lay, out past the city garage, the sun warming my face and theirs, too. Kept on pushing, turning left onto the gravel road that winds up toward a set of mostly empty brick buildings. We hit the top of a hill where we always, always turn left to walk onto the road the runs behind the Little League fields I played on a few lifetimes ago. I turned right instead, onto a dirt road that runs north, deep into the place where the yards expanded to their widest point.
“Why we goin’ this way?” Evie asked.
“I feel like it,” I answered.
We walked along the road and the woods soon closed in around us, and they both got a little spooked.
“It’s scary in here, Dad,” Evie said.
“Why?” I asked.
“’cause there’s wild animals in here, I think,” she answered. “Are you scared?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know there’s nothing in here that can hurt us more than we already been hurt,” I said.
I pushed the stroller past a no trespassing sign. I looked off to the right. A small old brick building, a story high, sat deep amongst some young trees. A little further ahead, a gigantic oil tank, covered from head to toe in rust. I searched the landscape for signs of the old roundhouse that once sat somewhere out here, I remember my father taking me out there as a youngster.
The roundhouse is long gone, along with almost all of the evidence that once upon a time, a gigantic and thriving hub of industry once stood there. Hundreds of people once worked there, and now, nothing but the smell of ragweed and decay. A dirty old town seems to look dirtier and older in the light of an empty and deathly silent early autumn sunset.
I could feel the nervousness of both of them so I turned around. I took another look around for the roundhouse, but it was still long gone. I thought of the people who once worked in what are now overgrown fields. I tried to imagine myself amongst them on a winter’s night seventy or eight years ago, the temperatures sinking to somewhere near zero, putting together six mile long freight trains headed toward the ports of Boston and New York, or unloading box cars in the frigid cold, their hands feeling about to fall off. Those kinds of jobs now long gone in these parts, and the people who worked them, the grandfathers of people I once went to grade school with, now buried in the hills on the opposite side of town. They believed, and they squirreled away their pay, living in flats not unlike the one I live in now, scrimping and saving, dreaming not of McMansions and flat screens but of sending the next generation off to college, to an education that would provide a passport into some kind easier life, a life that didn’t involve standing out in a rail yard in freezing temperatures in the middle of the night.
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We hightailed it out of there and down the Railroad Avenue extension and then on over to Chestnut Street. Evie and Riley seemed relieved to be back on familiar ground. Their chatter revved up again; they felt at home again. We walked up Chestnut and for some reason a memory overran me. An October day, almost to the exact date, an October Saturday in 1992. I thought of walking up this same street all those years ago with my boy Dan, voter lists in hand, canvassing for Clinton and for this other dude running for state Assembly on both the Democratic and Green Party lines. The local pundits thought this dude had a shot and I bought in, same way I bought into Clinton. My dad, an astute observer of socio-political trends and a first-order high school teacher of history, economics, government, current affairs, and bioethics, had shared with me his suspicions that Slick Willie was a secret Roosevelt liberal. I thought this assessment ignored the candidate’s clear history of Conservadem practice, but my dad had, a decade before it actually had happened, quite vocally predicted the collapse of the Soviet empire, and he’d elucidated the reasons for the collapse down to a science, so I gave his opinion a whole lot of weight.
Well, we all saw how that turned out. Roosevelt liberal, my ass. No sense recounting it here. Sometimes, even in relative youth – I was twenty six years old at the time – you really want your father to be right, and at your expense, but obviously, that was not the case in this instance. And the Green-Dem I talked about so enthusiastically with people on that long-gone Saturday, along with a bunch of other days, got slaughtered at the polls by a narcoleptic liquor store owner.
But anyway, I thought back to that Saturday as I pushed Evie and Riley along. Eighteen years. So much change. And a lot of it, on both the personal and political fronts, not so good. In those years I fell in love, worked in electoral politics, got married, bought and sold a couple of houses, brought three children into this mess, and watched the woman I married die at age of thirty-eight, with an eight year old, a three year old, and a fifteen month old baby at home.
I’ve thought it was over for all of us, and for me, too. The change over those eighteen years has been, in many ways, not so good. We’ve slid into a second Gilded Age here, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots wider than it has been in more than a century, and maybe more. A real and sometimes seemingly unbeatable oligarchy has taken control of the Big Picture, what with the politicians and the media now wholly-owned subsidiaries of Corporate America, Inc.
I try, as I push that stroller around, to think of life eighteen years from now. Will I even be here to see it? I’d be sixty-four at the time. Will there even be streets to roll a stroller down by then? What will a society unwilling to seriously grapple with the devastating effects of the end of cheap fossil fuel, unwilling to grapple with the devastating effects of climate change, and unwilling to grapple with the devastating effects of a government bought and sold to the highest bidder, look like with eighteen additional years of neglect and head-up-the-assism added onto it? Seems we’ve decided to ride this bitch until the wheels fall off, and then?
I shudder to think.
But still.
I think of eighteen more years. Of how I would love to have eighteen more years. I think back to eighteen years ago, of how I could not have imagined all that I would have lived through, the joy and the agony. I don’t know what we got left in the tank, and I don’t know what I got left in the tank, but I hope it’s something: I want to see what kind of world we leave to Evie and Riley, and either way, it’s been one hell of a ride, and I want to keep going for awhile.