James Burleigh
Well-known member
I pulled away in my rental car from my sister’s beautiful house in the Catskills Sunday morning to make the drive to the conference I’m attending in Providence, RI, early October 2012. On the way I wanted to stop and have a look at my old house and junior high school in Framingham, Massachusetts. I had not been back to Framingham since we left it to return to California 43 years ago, a move precipitated by our parents’ decision to get divorced.
We lived in Framingham from roughly 1967–1969, when I was between 11 and 13 years old. While living there I attended grades 7 and 8 at Lincoln Junior High School.
I wanted to go back to Framingham because for me the time I spent there was a high point of my childhood, if not the highest point. Maybe the reason Framingham is special to me is that it coincided with the time when I was just beginning to understand and define myself as an individual, and become aware of the broader world, which then included the Vietnam War. We wore peace signs and MIA bracelets.
But even if it served as the background for that transition, it was a place of firsts for me, a native Californian: four seasons, but most of all snow; brick buildings; Colonial-style homes; close friends; discovery of my interest in art; the Boston Museum of Fine Art; clothing as style and statement; playing music (drums); sledding; skating; working for money (mowing neighbors’ lawns).
And of course the background soundtrack for those years in Framingham was the rock and roll music that would later become known as “Classic Rock”—the Doors, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, the Beatles….
I always regretted leaving Massachusetts, because when I returned to L.A. I went from having lots of friends to having no friends. I went into high school that fall back in L.A.. I feel like in L.A. I had a lame high school experience, and that if I’d stayed in Mass., with all the friends I had, it would have been a much richer time.
So I wanted to go back and be in that physical space again, to see those views and landmarks that were so important to me then, the places that were the setting for all those strong memories and feelings.
I found and drove around my old neighborhood; it was immediately familiar, being etched on my memory:
>There was Maggie's house, there Nevin’s, and one of those was Margie Trust’s, the sexiest girl in the neighborhood (at 13?!);
>Here was the steep street Karl and I and our friends rode our skateboards down, sitting or standing or kneeling on them (no helmets or knee pads available to buy even if you wanted to);
>There was the massive corner lawn Karl and I mowed for the prince’s ransom of $5 (it’s still big), and which Mom sent us back to re-trim that one time when she thought we did a lousy job;
>Here was the hill we sledded down between the backyards of the parallel houses, something we could do because no one had fences;
>There was the corner where the school bus picked us up every weekday morning;
>I think that was Ernie’s house, the kid who told me one morning getting onto the morning bus that after getting off the evening bus he was going to beat me up (and he did);
>There was the house I was standing in front of with some friends when I first heard Sky Pilot by the Animals and wondered what the lyrics were all about, perhaps my first awareness of the Vietnam War (and later I decided I wanted to be a helicopter door gunner);
>Here was the section of street where one night, arms linked, Maggie, Nevin, Margie, and I sang Hey Jude at the top of our lungs down the middle of the street;
>And here was the house we lived in, where on winter days we would wake up and run to look out the living room window to see if it had snowed, followed by listening to the radio to hear which schools were to have snow days.
I parked in front of our house, got out, and took pictures. I knocked on the door—no answer. The owners weren’t there. So I became bolder and walked all around the house (no fences). When I left, I put the folder I’d brought with the old scanned photos of the house into their over-stuffed mailbox, with a note.
The whole neighborhood was very still and quiet during my visit; I hardly saw anyone at all. And maybe that was appropriate, because it made it all seem a bit like a ghost town, where old buildings sat like mute, unmoving sentinels over long-past, largely forgotten human events.
From the house, I drove downtown to see my old junior high school. Not a lot to report there. The building was unlocked, so I wandered in and around. No one challenged me. It’s an art school and museum now, but very run down. I could not get onto the third floor to see my old home room, where I first became aware of my interest in drawing when I spotted a framed landscape on the wall and began to work out in my mind all the problems the artist had to solve in executing it.
Then I walked the two blocks to downtown. On the way back to the car I ran into a cop and asked him, pointing across the street, “Isn’t that the old Lincoln Junior High School?” He said he’d been in Framingham since 1982, and it’s always been a museum. I told him I go back to 1969, and this is my first time back in 43 years.
“Didn’t miss much,” he said over his shoulder as he entered the coffee shop. “Trust me.”
While working on my bachelor's degree in philosophy at Berkeley, I picked up a book called The Human Experience of Time. Was it Faulkner or Marquez who described our perception of time as sitting in the back of a horse-drawn cart, with our feet dangling off the back and facing backward? I believe we tend to view long-past events as somehow "far away," the way stars are far away. But sometimes I wonder if they're not far away, but sort of "just over there," right around the corner. I seem to recall a Twilight Zone about that.
I work at Berkeley now, and occasionally visit my old philosophy department, walking up those same much-worn wooden stairs to the second floor that my younger self tread more than 30 years ago. And I always think of the ghost of my young self on those stairs. But was he there long ago, or is he there more like right now, next to me?
Unamuno said that memory defines who we are, that without it we are nothing (which suggests certain, say, existential effects of Alzheimers). In that sense, we are the concatenation of the moments in our life, like a chain is the sum of its links. You can examine each link in the chain, but can you do that with memories?
I gave it a try. I'm glad I went back to Framingham to have a look at that particular link in my chain. But it turned out to be only the ghost of those early, long-ago moments. A kind of snake's skin that can only suggest the rich, colorful, three-dimensional thing that passed this way once before.
The Leaves Were Peaking (October 2012)
My Old House
Me On the Right with My Brother and Wicked Aunt
Dad Gets Picked up in a Limo for a Ride to the Airport on a Business Trip
The Former Lincoln Junior High School (The Last Place I Looked Forward to Going to School)
This school was multi-story and all indoors, very unlike the one-level schools I was used to in California where every classroom opens to the outside.
We lived in Framingham from roughly 1967–1969, when I was between 11 and 13 years old. While living there I attended grades 7 and 8 at Lincoln Junior High School.
I wanted to go back to Framingham because for me the time I spent there was a high point of my childhood, if not the highest point. Maybe the reason Framingham is special to me is that it coincided with the time when I was just beginning to understand and define myself as an individual, and become aware of the broader world, which then included the Vietnam War. We wore peace signs and MIA bracelets.
But even if it served as the background for that transition, it was a place of firsts for me, a native Californian: four seasons, but most of all snow; brick buildings; Colonial-style homes; close friends; discovery of my interest in art; the Boston Museum of Fine Art; clothing as style and statement; playing music (drums); sledding; skating; working for money (mowing neighbors’ lawns).
And of course the background soundtrack for those years in Framingham was the rock and roll music that would later become known as “Classic Rock”—the Doors, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, the Beatles….
I always regretted leaving Massachusetts, because when I returned to L.A. I went from having lots of friends to having no friends. I went into high school that fall back in L.A.. I feel like in L.A. I had a lame high school experience, and that if I’d stayed in Mass., with all the friends I had, it would have been a much richer time.
So I wanted to go back and be in that physical space again, to see those views and landmarks that were so important to me then, the places that were the setting for all those strong memories and feelings.
I found and drove around my old neighborhood; it was immediately familiar, being etched on my memory:
>There was Maggie's house, there Nevin’s, and one of those was Margie Trust’s, the sexiest girl in the neighborhood (at 13?!);
>Here was the steep street Karl and I and our friends rode our skateboards down, sitting or standing or kneeling on them (no helmets or knee pads available to buy even if you wanted to);
>There was the massive corner lawn Karl and I mowed for the prince’s ransom of $5 (it’s still big), and which Mom sent us back to re-trim that one time when she thought we did a lousy job;
>Here was the hill we sledded down between the backyards of the parallel houses, something we could do because no one had fences;
>There was the corner where the school bus picked us up every weekday morning;
>I think that was Ernie’s house, the kid who told me one morning getting onto the morning bus that after getting off the evening bus he was going to beat me up (and he did);
>There was the house I was standing in front of with some friends when I first heard Sky Pilot by the Animals and wondered what the lyrics were all about, perhaps my first awareness of the Vietnam War (and later I decided I wanted to be a helicopter door gunner);
>Here was the section of street where one night, arms linked, Maggie, Nevin, Margie, and I sang Hey Jude at the top of our lungs down the middle of the street;
>And here was the house we lived in, where on winter days we would wake up and run to look out the living room window to see if it had snowed, followed by listening to the radio to hear which schools were to have snow days.
I parked in front of our house, got out, and took pictures. I knocked on the door—no answer. The owners weren’t there. So I became bolder and walked all around the house (no fences). When I left, I put the folder I’d brought with the old scanned photos of the house into their over-stuffed mailbox, with a note.
The whole neighborhood was very still and quiet during my visit; I hardly saw anyone at all. And maybe that was appropriate, because it made it all seem a bit like a ghost town, where old buildings sat like mute, unmoving sentinels over long-past, largely forgotten human events.
From the house, I drove downtown to see my old junior high school. Not a lot to report there. The building was unlocked, so I wandered in and around. No one challenged me. It’s an art school and museum now, but very run down. I could not get onto the third floor to see my old home room, where I first became aware of my interest in drawing when I spotted a framed landscape on the wall and began to work out in my mind all the problems the artist had to solve in executing it.
Then I walked the two blocks to downtown. On the way back to the car I ran into a cop and asked him, pointing across the street, “Isn’t that the old Lincoln Junior High School?” He said he’d been in Framingham since 1982, and it’s always been a museum. I told him I go back to 1969, and this is my first time back in 43 years.
“Didn’t miss much,” he said over his shoulder as he entered the coffee shop. “Trust me.”
While working on my bachelor's degree in philosophy at Berkeley, I picked up a book called The Human Experience of Time. Was it Faulkner or Marquez who described our perception of time as sitting in the back of a horse-drawn cart, with our feet dangling off the back and facing backward? I believe we tend to view long-past events as somehow "far away," the way stars are far away. But sometimes I wonder if they're not far away, but sort of "just over there," right around the corner. I seem to recall a Twilight Zone about that.
I work at Berkeley now, and occasionally visit my old philosophy department, walking up those same much-worn wooden stairs to the second floor that my younger self tread more than 30 years ago. And I always think of the ghost of my young self on those stairs. But was he there long ago, or is he there more like right now, next to me?
Unamuno said that memory defines who we are, that without it we are nothing (which suggests certain, say, existential effects of Alzheimers). In that sense, we are the concatenation of the moments in our life, like a chain is the sum of its links. You can examine each link in the chain, but can you do that with memories?
I gave it a try. I'm glad I went back to Framingham to have a look at that particular link in my chain. But it turned out to be only the ghost of those early, long-ago moments. A kind of snake's skin that can only suggest the rich, colorful, three-dimensional thing that passed this way once before.
The Leaves Were Peaking (October 2012)
My Old House
Me On the Right with My Brother and Wicked Aunt
Dad Gets Picked up in a Limo for a Ride to the Airport on a Business Trip
The Former Lincoln Junior High School (The Last Place I Looked Forward to Going to School)
This school was multi-story and all indoors, very unlike the one-level schools I was used to in California where every classroom opens to the outside.
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