Ribbons on the Trees

I wrote a blog post last week – while having a coffee in the Black Cow in Croton-on-Hudson. I wrote it out in longhand on the back of a financial statement. It didn’t get posted because the paper has gone missing. It’s probably somewhere in one of the unsorted piles of unimportant papers in my house. This is just as well. Here’s what it boils down to: “Now I know some kind of truth, but I cannot put it into words.” These words were written by Melissia Holbrook Pierson in The Place You Love is Gone: Progress Hits Home. In fact, she has put the truth into words. To sum up with more of her words, “What you know and love is finite. It is already slated for removal.” Please read this book. Let me know what you think. Akron, Ohio is the template for this loss, “Ohio can absorb all amounts of sadness. That is what it is there for.” In my own Ohio non-story, sometime between the end of the 1950s and the murder of the young President, my father almost took a job in Cleveland. He even went out there with my mother to look at real estate. They took the overnight train from Grand Central, which somehow in my mind queered the deal. If they had traveled on a spanking new 707 instead of creeping along on the dying water-level-route, things might have moved forward. Had I finished my growing up in Ohio an entire universe would have been created and another would not have come into being. Something tells me, at least as far as I’m concerned, the wrong choice was made (although my father clearly made the right choice for him). Do not ask me to explain. The answer is in Ms. Holbrook’s book.