I'm forever referencing places that
are no longer there, and haven't been in
generations. Sometimes, snatched from history and footprints and readings and
dead driveways and covered trolley tracks and still present retaining walls, even
before I walked the mortal coil. But, more usually, they're signposts.
The parking lot entrance and exit is there, across the street from where the Strand
used to stand -- the Broadway Diner was the Villa ... Ardie Gulamerian
and his brother built the two stories on 100 Summit Ave. as a garage
and installed the first car radio in town there in the 20s, in their 20s...
that was the Risen's tennis court, that the Unitarian Church school,
that Leo McGrath's house with the basement party
The exegesis goes, unceasing, overflooding the levee, at least one month past
the 90-day expiration date given to me the week of the move.
Unfortunately for the missus.
As Archie said to Edith, perhaps best to Stifle. Try to dummy up.
Scott's recall and desire to cement his roots in the present could only happen with the aid of his prodigious memory serves to bring the reader and help them understand his almost sad yet understandable nostalgia he has for Summit. So much contributes to this grabbing of time, distilling it, the remembrance of so many things from our/his collective and his personal past both combine, congeal and define his writing and so very much more. Scott is haunted in a sense by the intense/immense overshadowing of and the importance of an almost neurotic nostalgic devotion and dedication which have encompassed him,his writings, musings and thought for decades- through which he has travelled extensively and lived on different continents...this nostalgic 'Ball" he attends and shares with others in his mind, has shaped him and left him with intricately indelible characters like Arty or his time in the galleys of Grunnings, situations, stories... but unlike a wraith shimmering, shining and twisting intricately though the past,present and future, nostalgic rhymes & rhythms root Scott with grounded positive notions of the here and now that are derived from his past and nostalgic love and view of this Summit and her near by environs in the post 2008 betrayal of the American people and it's disuniting experiences...La and Scott are devoted to and have faith they will raise their the kids in a balanced environment, one that eluded Scott as a child. Despite some of the rawness and rejections that the author experienced growing up in Summit- his nostalgic realism will always propel him forward into a positive and , more often than not, encounters self realizations: literal,figurative,metaphorical and other wise. His cemented relationship with his primary family and local tribe have the potential to push,(or sear), his complex nostalgic wanderings into our consciousnesses where he takes on the proverbial contemporary trip into the universal mind. Scott's in depth writing/musings are to be contended with, moreover a dynamic pice of NOW.
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