Homesick (19 page)

Howard, who’s not just a venture capitalist but a visionary, came up with the idea to make Hope Village more than just a safe and comfortable place for kids to live until they reach the age of majority. He suggested that we make it a “campus for the care of children.” We could teach the kids all kinds of practical skills—the kinds of things more fortunate children learn from their parents. We could help them with their checkbooks, with college applications; then, after they leave, we’d still be available to offer them advice and guidance. What’s more, we decided to document everything we were doing; if the model works, we intend to create Hope Villages across the country—a nonprofit franchise dedicated to rescuing children from a failing system.

Though we’re still taking small steps, Hope Village is now a reality, and we have our first residents living there. As I write this, we’re putting the finishing touches on an emergency shelter to house the littlest children, from newborn babies to twelve-year-olds; this will complement the services already under way in our permanent home, which serves six- to eighteen-year-olds. Every time I come home to Meridian I stop by to see the boys and girls in residence, and I end up feeling so small (in a good way), and useful, for once. The kinds of horrific things those children have seen and borne in their few years on this earth are things most of us spend a lifetime without encountering.

It might have been unrealistic, even unfair, for me to try to adopt those two little boys—or any of the millions of other vulnerable children living in our world today—and make my home their own. But through Hope Village for Children, I hope to do something more: to give them a home. Not an institution, not an orphanage, but a home.

7

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They say you can’t go home again, but for the sake of our kids and the peace of my soul, Howard and I do the best we can. These days we travel down to Meridian five or six times a year. The city itself is mostly quiet now, its stately old buildings abandoned by shoppers when the malls started to open at the edge of town—just around the time, I realize, when I was heading north for New York.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. At the turn of the twentieth century Meridian was a major regional center, with five railroad lines passing through town carrying forty passenger trains per day to what was known as Mississippi’s Queen City. Two generations later, my Aunt Nancy remembers, the city was still hopping.

“Downtown was the heart of the whole community,” she recalls. “This was mostly an agricultural area then, and Saturday was the day all the farmers came into town for their shopping. That was the whole commercial district then, and you got to see everybody on the street on Saturday. It was very exciting. I can remember my mom taking me shopping to the nice department stores to buy clothes. It was such an event we would dress up for it.”

In the last quarter-century, though, the streets and storefronts of Meridian have emptied, as new generations shifted their attention from the city to the suburbs. This is what James Howard Kunstler is writing about in
The Geography of Nowhere:
that the abandonment of downtowns, where everything you needed was pretty much within a ten-minute walk, has made us a nation of loners, craving connectedness but having nowhere to find it. Postwar suburban living, he writes, has “done away with the sacred places, places of casual public assembly, and places of repose. Otherwise, there remain only the shopping plazas, the supermarkets, and the malls,” he writes. A town like Meridian, in other words, was a better place when there was a drugstore with a soda fountain downtown.

Aunt Nancy left Meridian and for many years ran a clothing store in Atlanta. She hates what the malls have done to the social experience of shopping. “You go to the mall, and you could be anywhere in the country,” she said. “There’s nothing distinct about it, and the service is horrendous. See, Sela, that’s why people would go to the old downtowns. Here in Meridian there’s Harry Mayer’s, the quality men’s store that’s still downtown. His dad started that business years ago, and they always give great service. People long for that personal service you get from knowing who you’re dealing with.”

And for every holdout like Harry Mayer’s, there are countless other Meridian institutions that are lying fallow. Take the old Opera House, for example. Back in the heyday of the railroad, I’m told, Meridian rivaled Birmingham and even Atlanta for sophistication. The city was prosperous, and cosmopolitan, enough to support a small opera house, which hosted performances by some of the greatest artists and entertainers of their time. The great Sarah Bernhardt sang there, and George Gershwin left his signature on his dressing room wall. You can still see it there today—but only if you’re lucky enough to know someone who’ll unlock the front door and let you in. Like so many others, the gorgeous, old-world jewel-box building now stands abandoned at the center of town.

Once we started returning to Meridian more often, I began thinking about ideas to help revive the old downtown of my childhood. Despite the weedlike spread of strip malls across America, after all, you can still visit neighborhoods in our older cities—Georgetown in Washington, the West Village and Brooklyn Heights in New York, Beacon Hill in Boston, among others—that retain (or have recaptured) that sense of thriving community space. It’s hard to walk among the cobblestone streets and redbrick town houses of such places, their sidewalks and cafés bustling throughout the day, without swooning. There isn’t a shopping mall on earth that’s ever made me swoon.

So now I’m working with a handful of interested souls to raise money to restore the Opera House, hoping that a hint of revival in the downtown Meridian air might someday prove contagious. It’s a dream of mine to help establish a performing-arts school behind that old brick façade, and I’m taking a real measure of care with it—in part because of an unnerving experience I’ve had recently in connection with another Meridian landmark: Weidmann’s.

Last year, when I learned that the owner of my favorite childhood restaurant was looking to sell, I went in with a group of interested locals to save the place. Our dream was to restore its kitchen to its former glory as one of the most celebrated in the South, while preserving the creaky charm of the interior space. But I’m learning a sobering lesson in the process: once you’ve made the decision to touch something old and dear with the magic wand of progress, you can’t always predict what’s going to happen. Modern building codes have already required more alterations in the interior than I’d have liked, and food-service regulations are going to prevent the managers from returning those old homemade peanut-butter jars to their rightful place atop every table. I’m still excited about the new Weidmann’s; when it opens up again late this year, I’m hoping its upgraded menu and first-class service will help bring people back downtown again. But inside I’ll be waving a guilty goodbye to a little slice of my past.

It seems like ages ago now, but when I think of the best times Howard and I have had down South, my mind turns immediately to the summer of 2001. I remember the weekend as if time had preserved it in amber: the Mississippi heat suddenly turned less humid, the sweet scent of red earth lingering on the air.

The road from town out to our farm is framed with a canopy of gallant oaks; Howard and I drive past a cow pasture and an old white dairy barn; then it’s one quick right turn and we’re rolling up to the gates of the farm.

As we follow the little gravel drive that leads to the Rose Cottage, the sun shining lower now, I see up the road the figure of my towheaded son. Austin’s going on eight, and his hair is growing longer in the back, like his father’s. And somehow he’s already talking a little like Howard, too—thoughtful and innocent, but with the glint of Howard’s cleverness. I can’t look at him without awe.

We slow down. “You want a ride?”

He smiles, through a mouthful of scrambled teeth. (If only there were an orthodontist in the family.) “No, I want to walk.” He turns on his heel and sets off running, with a beckoning wave. “You follow.”

He runs about a hundred yards, then flags, and steps over to the bank of our pond. We pull up alongside him again. He is transfixed by something sticking up out of the water. It’s a broken old stump, one he’s taken to calling the Turtle Camp. On the stump is a hand-sized creature, its head reaching out of its shell at the end of a long pencil neck. Austin’s been spotting turtles for about a week now, and he can’t get enough.

“It’s the turtle, Mom.” He’s fixed it with a stare; I think he’s wondering if it’s the same one he’s seen before. He’s just had a good long sprint, but he’s hardly winded. Then, just as he’s trying to figure out whether he can coax the turtle to the shore with a stick, the little guy dives off the stump back into the water.

“Never mind,” Austin says happily, and starts walking again. There’ll be another one down the road.

Anabella is waiting when we arrive, with a gaggle of long-haired cousins and the rest of the family. Her cheeks are rosy with the afternoon’s excitement. We give her hugs in turn.

“What are you wearing, honey?” She appears to be wearing both a dress and a little pair of pants. I seem to recall that being a fashion trend a few years ago among teenage girls, but I can’t imagine it’s trickled down to my four-year-old daughter.

“It’s for the bugs,” she answers.
Aha.
That’s my husband’s resourceful mind at work: long-sleeve dress to cover the arms, three-quarter-length pants to cover the legs. Plus—I pick up a whiff of it—a nice new spray of insect repellent. It’s about five o’clock, and about this time every day Howard worries that his daughter is going to become an all-you-can-eat Early Bird Special for the Mississippi mosquitoes. What amazes me is that Howard’s been away all afternoon; apparently Anabella’s learned to follow his lead.

The festivities are already under way at the cottage: drinks on the bank of the pond, beneath the weeping willows. The sun has gone down behind the trees, and the bullfrogs are chirping away at the prospect of dusk. The sweet smell of barbecue is in the air; the blades of the ceiling fans on the front porch spread the aroma like tangy sauce on white bread. Soon there’ll be plates piled high with succulent beef ribs, chicken, snap beans, cornbread, and sweet-potato casserole.