Important Places from your past that you now feel no connection to

[Sampiro]

I was at a conference the other day at my alma-mama, a school that I spent 10 years at off and on while getting my undergraduate degree (which was really more of a lifetime achievement award). It’s been 10 years since I graduated.

I know every hall and nook and cranny of the buildings around the place. I’m better acquainted with the library’s collection than many of the librarians. However, all of the professors I was close to have either retired, died or moved on to newer and more prestigious jobs, all of the students I was in school with have long since graduated, etc., and so while there was familiarity there was absolutely no sense of living connection to the place.

A few months ago I visited my birthplace, which is currently between owners. The little 1950s house occupied by my grandmother is now a long since abandoned mess with a caved in roof surrounded by a jungle of kudzu and other parasitic vines, the double-cabin occupied by my great-aunts is also overgrown and missing its chimneys (who steals a chimney?) and rear wings (they were cheap).

The house I grew up in is in incomparably better shape now than when I last set foot in it (1987). It’s subsequent owners did a ton of work to it, levelling it (a small sinkhole had reaked havoc with the foundation of its back wing) and restoring the garage and landscaping the back yards (no mean feat as they’re about 2 acres of them). The cattle pens and rabbit hutches and the huge barbecue pit we’d built and the “tree house” (a metal storage building blown into the tops of a grove of pine trees by a tornado two days after we built in and that remained there for more than a decade) were all gone but I also saw a lot things that I had forgotten (the limestone flower beds my sister had built, the knot on the big oak tree in front that looks just like a monkey ass in mid elimination, the fig trees rising from the graves of the St. Bernards, etc.) but again- absolutely no sense of connection whatever. It was like I was on the set of a movie being made about my life- the knowledge that I couldn’t walk inside (the door was locked) and that if I did it would be different (because among other things I could tell from looking through the windows they’d majorly remodelled, making one huge room where there had been four) just killed any nostalgia or sense of belonging. Hmm.

On the other hand, my grandfather has been dead for 26 years and his house, almost exactly the way he left it (except they cut down the bamboo canes that filled his back yard and- the bastards- filled in the flower pit we used to play “dungeon” in), makes me want to go inside. I feel major connection to the place, and love that they’ve left the green bottle flower beds and the concrete “dummie bombs” around the place. Strong sense of connection even though the current owners have probably never heard of the legendary Mustang and I haven’t set foot in the place for 7 years longer than the house where I lived for 20 years.

So what places that were once vital in your life to which you now have no sense of connection?

[fishbicycle]

I’ve lost all connection to the places I grew up in, or lived, back in Canada. At the house where I first lived, my father planted an oak tree in the front yard. It was there until I was in my mid-30s, and was one of the hugest trees I think I’ve ever seen. It’s gone now. When my (then) fiancee and I drove around looking at all the places from my life, it was just a yard. The house where I grew up has been remodelled. They knocked a hole for a bay window in the front, and turned the garage into living space. The house has slate aluminum siding now, and green trim. It used to be black and white. The trees in front of the house, the branches of which nearly landed on the roof during an ice storm, are gone. The hedges are gone. The tree in which I built all my forts, is gone. The bocce lane in the side yard of the Italian neighbors’ house is gone, and so are they. Even the ditch I played in is gone! The neighbors’ house and the field across the street, with the creek that ran down to a pond at the other end, is gone, replaced by a Tim Horton’s. And the grain elevator at the end of the street…is gone. All the people I knew from back then are gone. One of the few things that was left from my childhood there is the carvings into the brick of the schoolhouse wall, made by juvenile delinquents in the 1880s.

My grandparents’ home is still there, but after my grandmother died, I never set foot in it again. All the memories I have of that house! All relegated to the scratchy movie category. I knew where everything in that house was. It was big enough to have nooks and crannies! I have painted all of its rooms multiple times, and wallpapered others, and I sanded down the porch and painted it. That’s gone now. I wonder if they ever got rid of the smell of my grandfather’s pipe smoke…

I think the house where my other granparents lived was torn down a couple of decades ago. I hadn’t been inside it since 1975.

So I am disconnected from the places that are burned into my memory. There’s no point in going back there. I’d stand out on the sidewalk looking at the place, and the people inside would think I was a weirdo. It’s somebody else’s house, and has been for ages. I just remember them now, and it is awfully like an old movie that I saw once. I’ll not likely ever see any of these places again, except in photos.

[Mehitabel]

My high school. Haven’t kept up with the few friends I made there (I was a dork and besides, we all had jobs right after school and/or lived two subway hours away), hated the building, and both my favorite teachers have died.

My grandparent’s brownstone in Brooklyn, though, even though it’s now stuffed with five immigrant families, is still very nostalgic for me.