First Loves

"Araby," Shari, and Words

Not so long ago, I found myself driving near where I grew up, Rochester, Michigan, and, since I was close, I turned right onto my old street, Walbridge Drive, passed a bunch of houses that had sprung up in the old field where we used to ride our bikes, and then stopped right in front of the house I’d lived from age 7 to 12. It looked just like it had nearly 50 years ago, and yet it was utterly transformed in size and significance by time and all the miles I’d traveled since leaving there. The big willow was gone, the one under which Pete and Jerry and I set up a bike jump out of concrete blocks and a sheet of plywood and pretended we were Evel Knievel. And so was the big woods around the corner, where we’d hunt for garter snakes, keeping a keen eye out for the Reedy brothers, the bullies from the next block over. We worried they might see us and chase us or worse, catch us and tie one of us to a tree. Idling in front of that house, I was transported back to a different time, a different self.

This is from a screen grab from Google Maps Street View. In my memory, the willow tree is just to the left of the pickup truck, and a slab of plywood is propped up on some cement blocks to make a bike jump.

It’s much like the feeling I had this morning when I read the story “Araby” from James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners. On these lines I caught my breath, for I had returned in time:

“When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and toward it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cool air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.”

I continued on, enraptured by Joyce’s tale of a lad’s first love, his aching for the unnamed object of his affection. The story recalled my own first feelings of love, for a girl who lived just down the street from us.

All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: “O love! O love!” many times.

It was not just my first furtive love that the story brought to mind but, just as powerfully, the feeling I had when I first fell in love with language, with the power of words, thanks in part to this story. It had been 30 years, maybe 40, since I’d read this story last but the words leapt back into my mind, as familiar and potent as if I’d just read them yesterday. It’s as if they had been submerged just below the surface of my consciousness all these years. My memories of those words, so like the memories from my youth, filled my mind and my heart, instantly reconnecting me to my younger self, making me keenly aware that though the cells in my body constantly turn over, ensuring that no part of me today is who I was then, there is yet something continuous … perhaps consciousness, perhaps a soul … that spans time and will be with me always for it is me. These words, these thoughts, remind me of why I spent years of my life studying literature and why I still read at least an hour every day. Words, like memories, transport me to different places, different times. They remind me that I’m human.

This is the version I remember reading, probably in a college English class at Michigan State University, probably taught by Barry Gross, who certainly helped me love literature.

My thanks to

Mr. Troy Ford

and

Dr. Kathleen Waller

for sparking my little journey with their post:

Why I ❤️ James Joyce's "Dubliners"

Troy promises there are more coming … I look forward to it. Perhaps you will too.