Elsewhere

"The mechanism of human destiny – that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint - is surely meant to remain life’s central mystery, to resist transparency, to make blame a dangerous and unsatisfactory exercise.” Richard Russo, “Elsewhere”

“Elsewhere” is a memoir about the relationship between favorite author Richard Russo and his mother, Jean, who sought to escape the upstate mill town of Gloversville and lived either with him or nearby her entire life.  By turns hilarious and sad, the book contains events and personality traits similar doings and characters found in Russo’s novels.  Taking away his mother’s huge pill supply while she was in the hospital, Russo felt “like the parent who’d disposed of the weed he discovered in the back of his kid’s closet.” After his mother dies and her ashes are scattered at sea, Russo belatedly realizes that she exhibited the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and that he was not so different from her as he once imagined.  Fortunately, Russo’s adult compulsion – fiction writing - enabled him to make a comfortable living.

Russo wrote that, unlike many university-trained novelists, he valued plot, paid attention to pacing, and had little tolerance for literary pretention. His literary references- to Kafkaesque nightmares, Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic, Jim Thompson’s crime fiction characters helpless in the grip of relentless forces, Melville’s Bartleby saying, “I prefer not to” – are easily grasped. And, finally, as per Thomas Wolfe’s acknowledgement, Russo realized that he couldn’t go home again, not even for Jean’s family memorial service.  He described his final sighting of the house on Helwig Street where he grew up:

    The hazardously sloping back porches, up and down, had been amputated, and nobody had even bothered to paint over the scars. The back door I was in and out of a hundred times a day as a boy now opened into thin air, a four-foot drop to a rectangle of hard brown earth that the house’s new owner couldn’t be bothered to seed.  After that, I no longer had the heart, or maybe the stomach, to bear witness, so strong was my sense of personal failure.

I enjoyed returning to my home town of Fort Washington every five years or so, when best friend Terry Jenkins and I would retrace neighborhood haunts. For many years our old homesteads were in decline.  In my case a German couple whom I expected would be model owners took more interest in building a second home in the Poconos.  Once, Terry talked them into letting us inside; the rooms seemed smaller and shabby, and I spotted a photo of some relative, surely, in a Nazi uniform.  On our last tour new owners had spruced up the lawn and garden, painted the side fence and garage, and left the magnolia and Japanese trees in their full splendor.  The Jenkins estate now had two houses on it, but we copped an invitation to come inside the 150-year-old original (at least as far as the first floor) and were impressed with the new décor with several doors removed and the screened-in porch now the main family room. Terry recalled that his old man had arranged for one screen door to face out and the other in so their collie, Taffy, could exit and enter at her pleasure.

Many former Gary residents share Russo’s reluctance to visit the neighborhoods of their youth, at some point having become determined to live elsewhere.  That was not the case with former Catholic priest and longtime Gary teacher John Sheehan, who nonetheless wrote a volume of poems titled “Elsewhere, Indiana” (1990).  The title poem goes:

Gary
a tenuous misshapen T

gerrymandered for planners

who live elsewhere

your streets torn up by heavy trucks

that make money for peopl

who live elsewhere

your “urban renewal”

twenty years old

only just begun

high-paid planners

mostly gone elsewhere

profits gone elsewhere

ain’t nobody here to say

enough money where their mouth is

how you can really be

a good place to live

for those who can’t very easily

go no elsewhere

         except maybe somewhere even worse

than this here where


like high-rise Chicago
one thing Gary
your kids growing up
if they can dodge bullets
that enrich profiteers
elsewhere
can look out their windows
and walk out their doors
to somewhere

Gary, Indiana
where
in spite of mammoth trucks
bisecting tri-state expressway
and abandoned buildings
they can see trees and squirrels and birds
and every manner of God-given beauty
in the trash-lined dunes and swamplands
 
but they can’t see the lake
unless they get out to Miller
and it’s hard to find the river too. 

Ray Smock responded: “Gary's story is the story of American exploitation and capitalist greed.  Far too many places in this country are just like Elsewhere, Indiana. The whole damn country is Elsewhere."

Muralist Felix “Flex” Maldonado described a labor of love in honor of the Region first responders that now exists in Gary’s Miller beach neighborhood:

    10 days.. 10 days of scorching sun, sweating so profusely it burned eyes while i painted, sweaty masks, ankle breaking rocks, rain storms disrupting my flow, mosquitos biting so bad i couldn’t stand it.... but i carried on because, knowing all this, i knew i would finish one day.... but not for these individuals who CHOOSE to struggle through worse conditions EVERYDAY.. This mural is a tribute to ALL first responders who put their lives on the line so we can try and live a little better life- my “heroes”, as I like to call them... i dedicate this one to you.

    Thank you Pat and Karen Lee, of Lee Companies for allowing me to bring this long awaited vision to life. you have made the community and this world a better place...

    if you see a first responder, tell em “FLEX” said “thank you”.. @ Miller Beach Indiana