I’m a sentimental sort. I know you can’t ever go home again because home isn’t just a space on a map, but a space in time as well. It was a place in time that will never be again. People grow up, new people come in, property changes hands, buildings are torn down and replaced, power structure shifts and the place becomes unrecognizable from what it was.
But that has never stopped me from trying to retrieve something from all the places I’ve lived. My first love of place wasn’t my own town, but the San Joaquin Valley town my cousins grew up in and where I spent summer vacations with my big brother. Gustine was a one square mile town in those days, in the middle of miles and miles of flat, bountiful fields of lettuce, melons, strawberries, garlic, each bordered by Eucalyptus windbreaks and threaded with canals carrying the rich, cool mountain water of the far Sierras, purple on the eastern horizon.
There was one elemenatary school, a small downtown area, not much more than two hundred yards of business bordering Main Street. the sidewalks were always busy with foot traffic, mostly women shopping and doing their business to fill their family larders.
Azevedo’s general store was smack dab in the center, on the corner of Main and Central next to the ornate Ritz movie theater. Old man Azevedo sold me my first beef jerkey. When we boys, not one of us over ten, went fishing in the canals, Azavedo would toss us old scraps of baloney he would dig from around his meat slicer. We would tie the scraps to the end of our lines and tease crawdads out of the water, then cut up the crawdads as bait for the big fish.
He was always good for a free bag of dog bones for our mighty hounds. He had the best bubble gum in the Valley, always with a top-of-the-line baseball player in the package, an All-Star Roger Maris, or a Willie Mays, or a Willie McCovey. It never failed. It was luckiest store on earth. An All-Star Willie Mays card was good for two Don Drysdales after the 1960 season. My brother once drew a Bo Bo Bolinski card and couldn’t give it away, much less trade it. It was a bad day in Gustine for him, and that wasn’t bad at all.
The houses of the town abruptly ended on three sides at the vegetable fields and on the fourth, was a huge walnut orchard owned by Manuel Souza, who spent his days playing cards with Azevedo in the back of the store. The orchard began in back of my cousin’s house.
Kendra, my teenage cousin, told me the walnut orchard was haunted and for proof, she pointed out a big, dead, gnarly walnut tree and convinced me it had been alive the night before. The witch was angry and would only be pacified by eating a little boy. We were standing in the orchard at dusk when she told me about the witch. Girls were safe, but not little boys. And night was not a good time for little boys to be in the orchard. I ran all the way home before the twilight turned to darkness, leaving her in my dust. Years later, she told me that she was going to meet her boyfriend in the orchard and needed to get rid of me.
The town put up a huge feast and fireworks on Fourth of July. Cotton candy, pony rides, carnival games, and then we would all spread blankets on the grass of the playing field at the high school and watch the fireworks. Every kid felt that it was all just for us.
Once Gustine made the national news. It had been discovered that the only town doctor, who had been serving his community since mustering out of WWII, was an imposter. It was a huge scandal. I think he had to go to prison, but I don’t remember. But he broke a lot of hearts.
Fifteen later, I was driving down 33, through Lodi. Crow’s Landing, Stockton, from Sacramento, and I remembered this town, this amazing place from my childhood. As I slowly drove down Main Street, I could see for the first time in my life why you can never go home again. Azavedo’s was gone and Azavedo was long in his grave, the store replaced by a big parking lot surrounding a Safeway, interrupting the whole feel of downtown. No longer was Main lined with small brick stores, like Azevedo’s grocerie and butcher shop. Swindon’s hardware store was now a new Ace Hardware and Swindon was long in his grave. They had torn down both the old Spanish colonial elementary and high schools and put big, square concrete buildings with only a few thin tinted windows in their place, in one efficient complex. No arches, no architectural filligree, just plain, sterile, concrete cubes big enough to confine the town’s children for eight hours a day in nearly windowless buildings—god forbid they be distracted.
My Aunt had moved to the coast years before, all my cousins were either starting their lives and having babies or going to college. I asked a gas station guy what happened to Azevedo and he said some old man made out fine when Safeway came in and died on his land years ago. But he didn’t know his name. What was left of Souza’s orchard looked sick and uncared for. There had been an economic shift. People didn’t work in town anymore. Now they could drive to better jobs in Merced, or Stockton.
I drove out of there pretty depressed. Over the years, this has happened to me many times. Now I can track the changes of the places I’ve lived on Google Earth and Streetview. Sometimes, late at night, I go back to Europe. Sometimes to the town in Florida where I spent my adolescence. Sometimes to Bodega Bay and Bolinas where I spent my college years.
One late night around 2005, I looked up my first summer crush on the net. Becky Betancourt, the most beautiful girl in Gustine, California in the summer of ‘62. She had graduated Gustin High, gone to SF State, married, raised three kids, divorced and was very successful in SF commercial real estate. And her LinkedIn photo showed an extremely attractive woman. Yep. I could always pick ‘em even at nine.
People are dead and gone, new people have arrived and changed everything, malls and apartments now fill wetlands and Xbox killed off the intricate economy generations of kids built around the baseball card trading market.
None of these places exist anymore.
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