City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations and Theses City College of New York 2012 The Lost Songs of Somerville Scott Cerreta CUNY City College of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/510 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] 1 The Lost Songs of Somerville By Scott Cerreta 2 I And a one, a two, a one, two, three, four. Remember me? I used to be the face of America, at least according to the painted cover of a once famous magazine. You’ll remember the picture if I show it to you: I’m the kid in the middle with the chipped tooth, a small flag planted in one young fist and a dying sparkler in the other; I’m sitting on a grassy hill with my family and some neighbors and the picture’s perspective is that of being just downhill looking up at us; our faces, still glowing with wonder, are all staring up into a darkening evening sky filled with fireworks which are, at that moment, in exact full neon blossom. Can’t find the likeness? Well, it was a long time ago and though some of us do, I guess most of us don’t, as children, much resemble our eventual adult selves. Anyway, the face of America wasn’t really me, it was our town, Somerville, they were referring to, back when this country was still knowable enough that one could imagine its true essence being found in such a small and simple space. And once upon a time this really was a special place— there was a harmony to how we passed our time together, an interdependent rhythm in how lives lived themselves around here that was so much more comprehensible than this staticky haze of solitary busyness we’re all buzzing around in today. And so allow me to reminisce. Because do any of us ever become all we once thought we could be? We all have a home we’d like to go back to—one we remember, one we imagine—and is it really for another chance to be who we were then, or is it to bring the who we are now back home to the who we still could be? So imagine, for a moment, lifting every appointment on your calendar and every bill on your ledger back into the weightless skies of possibility, and then remember when this whole life you’re now trying so hard to live was nothing more than a tiny tingling sensation inside you, just a burst sac of tadpoles still swimming their way through the waters of your mind’s eye. Remember what that felt like? . it felt like you could be anything. 3 It Is Not Down In Any Map; True Places Never Are1 Our oldest records list this place as Somer’s Nest, a settlement the famous Captain Somers negotiated with the Toquam Indian tribe, who kept their hunting grounds across the river and in the hills, at least for a few more treaties. The surrounding hills provided steady weather for well-nourished crops, and the river’s predictable floods left a layer of newborn loam every spring, providing the settlement with enough bounty to not only survive its harsh winters, but to thrive overall by selling its excess grains to the less successful neighboring settlements. Sometime later, beneath the command of another Somers, this one a Colonel, we became a main post for a full brigade of General Washington’s army. A natural basin, the entrance to Somer’s Nest was flanked by rocky hills on three sides which, tapering together, funneled the huge Redcoat regiments into sizes our hungry soldiers found to be, to their initial wonderment, believably defeatable. Colonel Somers and his troops stayed here several months once, and the place kept them safe. Of course, to claim their full independence, our young upstarts would eventually have to leave the Nest and so they marched together in tight formation right up to the very edge of it before tumbling, each one by then a lone screaming soul, out into the bloody chaos, their guns blazing. 1 A quote from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He was referring to the isle of Kokovoko, the homeland of Queequeg, the would-be savage cum selfless hero; a man born seemingly nowhere and who would go on to become a citizen of the world and perhaps the moral center of America’s greatest novel. 4 Somerville was small, only three by five miles and what most people remember of it are the smaller and more intimate parts of even that. Coming the way the crow flies, you’d have noticed two main thoroughfares: Elm Street, which poured straight down out of the hills, crossed the southern part of the Toquam River and ended at Main Street, which was, to your left, renamed Old Main Street by then. Old Main Street ran North-South and was less than half a mile long: on the West side of the street (your left), beyond tall, road-iron gates, the Americana Figurine Factory, our largest employer, stood like a huge, dry-docked cargo-ship, and along the other side of the road ran a long, spired stone wall, on the other side of which sat Sunnyside Park and that same hill I’d been painted watching the fireworks from that summer of long ago. Beyond all this the road flared out enough to allow a quarter mile of angled parking spaces in front of the storefronts that came off the unidentical twin clusters of one and two-story brick buildings running down both sides of the street. The buildings were sun-bleached, covered in multi-colored wooden signs, and attired with a handful of striped awnings— each one providing about enough cover for a half-dozen of us to get in out of the rain. Toward the end of Old Main stood the Federal Trust Bank and Palmer’s Grocery on one side, and the old Dream Lanes Bowling Alley, and the Rialto Movie Palace on the other. Everything still cul-de-sac’d around Veteran’s Park and in front of the old Town Hall, whose grand marble steps were flanked by two tall statues: one of each Somers. The Town Hall was a three story columned 5 Victorian which, along with the reliable hourly chime of the big bank clock, sort of anchored everything down. The bank is the one thing still there, though it tries on a new alias every few years; its clock still stands too, though it doesn’t tell time anymore—its chime, of course, is long gone. Most of us lived on the quiet little roads that curled around inside the couple of square miles between the two main roads and the river, roads that had thickened and thrived around one another over the years, a place where the things that had always grown out of the land and the other things that had to be cemented or nailed down to it had seemed to come to some sort of agreement with one another. It was a habitat of crooked sidewalks and leash-less dogs, of watered green lawns, sculpted shrubbery, and those great yawning front porches that came off shingled bungalows colored every color in the crayon box. We had a lot of trees around here, a lot of Elms and a lot of Maples—a schoolteacher had once taken my class for a long walk and pointed out to us the arboreal path by which a Somerville squirrel could circumnavigate our entire little town without ever having to leave the sky. This was a model town. That deathless song of lament chorusing so many of our local newscasts: I just never thought it could happen here—well, it is Somerville, without their even realizing, that this endless parade of our shocked brethren keep comparing themselves to. So what happened? Hard to say. Small changes we notice: they interrupt our sleep; they set our minds itching. But when everything changes, that’s another matter altogether isn’t it? Because that kind of 6 change has a way of gathering an imminent and undetectable momentum, because it doesn’t come from the world we live in, it comes from the world that the world we live in lives in—and sometimes this larger world wakes from its dream, stretches out its great limbs, turns over to start sunning its other side and, by the time we’ve rubbed our eyes open and taken a good look around, the way we thought things would always be is in puddles around our feet and has already begun to drift, a single drying molecule at a time, back into the universe. I do not have that which I think you seek, reader, which is an answer. We’re all looking for answers these days, and answers, whatever they always lack in truth, do indeed offer the light touch of brevity and the tranquil warmth of reassurance. But against all instinct I have decided, in my autumn years, to try shedding the numbing comfort of the easy lies I’ve lived by and so what I’ll offer instead is what we all offer when we’re missing an answer: a story. This is the story of a single summer—that one summer I’ve decided upon as the season of origin in regards to all this change I’ve been going on about.