For the eighth day, I stared out the eighth floor window of the Hotel Elkhart. Below me spread the Midwestern town I grew up in. I’d contracted Covid on my summer vacation back to my high school reunion, and was now stuck quarantining in this hotel. Looking out my window, I did a lot of thinking about my youth in this town.
Author, Edith Wharton, called the time of her youth before World War I “the age of innocence.” For me, my youth was the “age of passion.”
My feelings ran deep when I was young. When I was happy, I was ecstatic, and when I was surprised, there was wonderment. I’d also experienced shattering pain. The point was, I felt alive. I got hooked on those rich feelings, enough to propel me through the later challenges of adulthood.
Gazing down at the street below, I thought about all the things that had happened to me here as a young girl. Downtown Elkhart was no longer the commercial center it used to be, with stores like Zeisel’s Clothing and Jack’s Records. Now it seemed more of an artistic/cultural hub. A colorful mural was painted on the outside wall of the Chamber of Commerce building, and life-sized, whimsical sculptures, like a man relaxing on a park bench, dotted the city scape. When I was sixteen, I loved shopping downtown. I remember strolling along Main Street, my long, dark hair swinging down my back, thrilled to be spending my first paycheck from my new job.
There’s so many wonderful “firsts” when you’re young.
I wanted to buy a Nehru jacket because the Beatles wore Nehru jackets after they’d spent time in India. They wore Nehru jackets for the cover of their “Sargent Pepper” album.
From my hotel perch, I could even see down Second and Third Street. I spotted the public library on Second. It looked the same as it did when I was young, a monumental structure built of solid, Indiana limestone. When I got my first public library card, I wandered the stacks of that library until I came upon a horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. The book freaked me out, but afterwards, I was on a horror-reading jag. One summer, home from college, I ran into Dennis Collins at the library. I had a crush on Dennis in elementary school. I was shocked to see the spunky little boy I'd known, rolling a wheelchair into the library.
Almost apologetically, Dennis explained he’d been wounded in Viet Nam and was paralyzed from the waist down.
The old Elkhart High School used to be located somewhere between Second Street and Third. The 1911 building was torn down years ago, but I attended school there my sophomore year. I can still hear the school’s creaky wood floors and metal lockers banging in the hallways. A race riot broke out on the street in front of the old high school. It was the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement, and I was afraid, watching a group of white guys face off against a few, brave Black students.
Finally, the day arrived when I was no longer contagious from Covid. I slipped out of my hotel room to get some fresh air and took a walk along a paved pathway. I came upon one of those life-sized sculptures, this one of a policeman holding a little girl’s hand. I stared at it for a long moment. When I was twelve-years-old, only three blocks away, a policeman touched my hand too, as he broke the news my brother had died in an a swimming pool accident at the downtown YMCA.
That happened a long time ago, but still I stood there awhile, in front of the policeman statue, remembering. How interesting, I thought, that the template for my life had been laid down in my youth: the growing and working, the learning and loving, and yes, even the dying.