Old Edwin O'Connor

I'm reading a book called "The Edge of Sadness," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962.  One of my little life goals is to read every single Pulitzer winner.  This one had a bit of a dry start - the central character is an aging priest in a dying parish - but I am getting the feeling that he is suffering the fallout of an alcohol problem.  Interest piqued.

Anyway, this passage about a visit to his childhood neighborhood struck me:"I had come back, not to stay, but only for an hour so - long enough to see and to savor again, for the first time in nearly five years, that small and surprisingly unchanged part of the city where I was born and had spent so much of my life, where I knew every building and back alley as well as I knew my own front yard, where I had been a young man, and where, as in no place, else, I had belonged, I had been at home.  I suppose it's the mark of the provincial man, but in any case I find that I have a special and lasting love for this place which is so obviously just a place, which has no particular beauty or grace or grandeur of scene, but which is, quite simply, a neighborhood, my neighborhood, ca compound of sights and smells and sounds that have furnished all my years."

I have been confronted in a fairly direct and straightforward manner, with little nuance, by the death of my parents.  I have been struggling a lot more to make sense of the loss of place I have felt in my increasing estrangement from my birth city.  This passage captured that feeling as well as anything I've come across in a while.  It isn't that I'm thinking back about the mansion on top of a bluff overlooking the ocean that was my childhood home, a place of uncommon beauty, but instead that place where I knew every nook and cranny, who lived in every house, where every street led.

I have been visited by these strange flights of fancy where I am walking, drifting, floating through the home where I was raised, the homes of both sets of grandparents, even the apartment where my folks briefly lived.  These people were of a generation where you lived where you lived and nowhere else.  I can see every picture and every stick of furniture, every decoration, feel the cool dampness of the basement in the summer, the heat coming off the gas stove in the bathroom in the winter, smell the musty basement smells and the hot, dry attic ones.

It's a long, strange journey.