Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Ninety Years in Steelton

Beautiful.

She passed the next year (2012).

I surely knew a scion of her well-regarded family, same name from the same small town. I worked with this very kind and cultured man, a Vietnam vet, a number of years ago. I had such meaningful conversations with him which have stayed with me, as I was a teenager then and we worked side by side all through the night in a rather isolated place. We traded novels and records. I remember I was reading Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs that summer. We explained everything to each other. It was very nice. I remember listening to a recording of Croatian folk songs he had loaned me.

I wonder if St. Lawrence has returned. The nearly life-sized saint has been missing from his shrine in front of the CFU Lodge on Highland Street for at least a few weeks. I hope it wasn't another religious shakeup. Those things still happen here. Sometimes you realize we are still enacting Europe's dramas and divisions of centuries past in our little town. Just much more quietly.

I'm so used to saluting him as I walk down the sidewalk, that divine clutching his holy book (both he and the book are painted wood) in his shady niche which faces the traffic of Front Street and the remains of the steel mill on the other side of that rather busy street, on the other side of the narrow little canal that parallels it for miles.

Both sides of the street/canal are holding steady these forms of a rapidly vanishing past.

The mill is what Trump saw as his plane came in from the west, the desuetude of which led him to refer to this town (which he confused or conflated with the city of Harrisburg) as a "war zone."






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