So, there is a childhood imagery that stirs and alters my mood in late November. But in truth, my most memorable Thanksgiving took place later, in 1976, after moving from England to Massachusetts with R. I was 22 years old, he was 20. We would be lovers and partners, on and off, during the decades to come. It would become a tenacious and fraught old love story, that’s for certain. But in 1976, young love we were.

We arrived in America in late October, lugging one unwieldy kit bag each, and two ill-formed hopes: jobs and college. Although born in America, R had not set eyes on the nation since the age of two. So, I took the lead in choosing our destination. Massachusetts, I said without hesitation (although I had never been there). I told R this was because of all the universities there, but in retrospect, I admit that I had long been affected by the music of the word. Massachusetts. It conjured melodies and lyrics too, Patti Page singing Old Cape Cod (1957), the Bee Gees’ Massachusetts (1967), Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ Roadrunner (1972).

Alongside (however incongruently) those varied songs, the word Massachusetts conjured an image seeded during childhood Thanksgivings. Yes, somewhere below consciousness, those old Currier and Ives plates stored deep in my mother’s hutch-cupboard still haunted my mind. If anywhere in America resembled the wintry scenes on those plates, surely it must be New England. I didn’t think this. I felt it. It was like one of those dreams you cannot remember upon waking, yet it follows you around afterwards. It makes you a little reckless and irrational. And in this instance, it made Massachusetts the place to be.

There we went, R and I. Jobs and college were the general plan, though how we might pursue these remained vague. We started in Boston, poring over the newspaper job vacancy ads. There was a sharp, icy wind blowing through the city streets that first week in America, and our cheap digs were cold too. Each morning on our way out to pound the pavement, we passed an underdressed flower seller, hunched against the bitter wind and calling out to passers-by. On the fifth day or so, he must have felt as discouraged as we did. “Please buy my goddamn, fucking flowers,” he cried.

R’s father had a friend in the western part of the state, in the town of Northampton. We took him up on an offer of a few free nights there, bought a couple of bus tickets with our dwindling dollars, and headed west. First of what would be many times on the Mass Pike, as it is known by locals.

Northampton

Soup Kitchen/Thanksgiving story - cast of characters: Gary and Minda Goss, Evan Daniels, Melissa Soalt, Bob Cook, Bob Michels. All the other workers and friends of the Soup Kitchen restaurant (and other Northampton friends soon to be met – because if you didn’t work there, you came in for soup and conversation).

In 1976, there was a funky little restaurant called the Soup Kitchen on Main Street. We walked along its long wooden floor to the back, where we grabbed a quiet table and asked for coffee. Running out of money and options, we dreaded going back to Boston.

When the coffee arrived, we asked the nice fellow (Bob Cook, I choose to believe) if he knew the best place to look for jobs in Northampton. “Let me get Evan,” he said. Soon, Evan Daniels and pretty much everybody on shift that day were sitting down with us and helping. Advice and ideas came fast and generous, so fast and generous that by the end of the day, our lives had taken a turn. R had a job bussing tables in the Soup Kitchen. And Evan and Melissa, within hours of our meeting, had found us a little apartment on Belmont Avenue and lent us $500 to put down for it. It was a one-bed flat on the second floor of a classic New England wood-frame house. It had piping hot old-fashioned radiators, and sash windows with wavy glass looking out on ground that would soon be covered with snow.

By the following week, I was waitressing the late shift at the Filling Station, an all-night diner on Pleasant Street (many tales there, for another time) but within months, I was working at the Soup Kitchen too. Forever thanks are due to Gary and Minda Goss for taking in two strays who really had no idea where we were or what we were doing. But it was the beginning of a life-changing time - young love, the seasons of New England, deep friendships, adventures and collaborations, university study, and jobs in the local mental health programs.

Anyway, to our first Thanksgiving in western Massachusetts. Gary and Minda decided to invite all the people connected to the Soup Kitchen for a big Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant. Each guest, about 30 of us in all, brought a contribution to the meal. This was R’s first Thanksgiving ever. For me, not the first, but certainly, a feeling that we had found a family in Northampton. After a Thanksgiving dinner “that couldn’t be beat” to borrow from Arlo Guthrie, Bob Michels brought his band, Johnny & the Luncheonettes, to play. We danced off the turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. Alice’s Restaurant was only up the road from Northampton, but we wrote our own Thanksgiving tale that year.

At the end of Thanksgiving night, a few of us went ice skating by moonlight on Paradise Pond. I forgive myself, all these years later, for believing that I had finally skated into a storied Currier and Ives scene. Yes, life is partly made up of such illusions. In time, life would bring change, joys, trouble, and loss. Young love would grow old. Northampton would gentrify. Many friends would move away or die. And the Soup Kitchen would close.

But like Dorothy landing back in Kansas after tapping her ruby-slippered heels together, only to find that no one believes her, I protest. I insist! I say the story above was real. People are good, places are beautiful, and such memories keep us ever hopeful.

Songs:

Armistice Soundwave was produced by Coda To Coda (an innovative London-based sound design team) for the Imperial War Museum, London. The last sounds of shells and gunfire and (from the 11.00 a.m. moment) the first sounds of peace, were recreated using the data recorded on the Western Front by the British Army’s equally innovative ‘sound-ranging’ equipment as used at the time.

Here is a more detailed account of the process, one which drew on technologies from then and now to help us with our reiterative/innocent/poignant human longing to relive, or failing that, re-sense, that which belongs to the past.

“As installation composer and designer, our quest to reimagine what the end of the First World War might’ve sounded like began with a single image. The Imperial War Museum provided us with an archival section of film titled End of the War, made on Armistice Day, 1918. It depicts a recording from a ‘sound ranging’ unit used to pinpoint the precise location of enemy guns, based on the vibrations made by their gunfire. Combining this information with a deep dive into the history of WW1 artillery sounds, we reconstructed the transition from the intense cacophony of gunfire to the utter peace following the ceasefire. Inspired by both Laurie Anderson’s ‘Handphone Table’ (1978) and the sound-ranging technology itself, we created a bone-conduction sound bar for the Museum. By placing their elbows on the table of the bar and cupping their ears with their hands, visitors were able to both hear and feel the sound of this seminal moment in human history.” (Coda To Coda)

Remembering Sound (Laurie Anderson)

“In the end, I liked the way listening to the table, head in hands, was the same body posture as the moment of inspiration and depression that initiated the project. I recently redesigned the table, updating the electronics and am happy that it retains its eerie presence: a resonance that seems more remembered or imagined than heard.” (Laurie Anderson)

For more about Anderson’s Sound Table, see Eschaton—Anselm Kiefer Foundation.

I’ve written elsewhere about the elusiveness of British culture, this despite having now lived here longer than anwhere else, including my U.S. homeland and France (see Love and Estrangement). In that earlier piece, I returned to key moments that now, looking back, seem part of a gradual recasting of my knowledge and affection when it comes to the UK.

“I can’t help but notice that some subtle shift has occurred - say over the past decade. A realization that, despite my frequent declarations about how utterly incomprehensible England is, some deeper knowledge was forming. Not the knowledge of one born here. Not the deep-set awareness of regions and accents, class slights, post-imperial cruelties, and historical divides. Not the grasp of those stereotypical, grain-of-truth traits we talk about – British reserve, eccentricity, concealed meanings. I have a sense of these, even a competence in many of them, but they remain foreign in my mind.

But yes, such knowledge comes, even if it hides beneath everyday consciousness. And more than that, affection comes. I am now regularly struck by waves of love for the UK. As with America, it is not uncritical, but it is surprisingly committed. It’s a love of landscapes and people. Early friends here and recent ones too. Footpaths in Yorkshire, Devon, Sussex, and Scotland. Walking coastal paths or across downs or moorlands to a country pub. Particular London bus routes and tube lines - the great city in its layered history and glorious diversity. The National Health Service, postwar Britain’s greatest achievement. The BBC, for all its flaws. Labour Party meetings that got out of hand. Pub gatherings after Labour Party meetings that got out of hand.” (Love and Estrangement)

In the piece, I dig up old and seemingly small incidents that mark this changing cultural knowledge and affection, ending with the subject of today’s brief postcard: my first encounter with Bonfire Night - the annual celebration of November 5th and the Gunpowder Plot.1

In 1981, not long after moving to the north London neighbourhood of Finsbury Park, I was exiting the tube station when I heard kids’ voices calling out, “Penny for the Guy!”2 And then I saw them, huddled just inside the station entrance on a cold and darkening November night, a homemade ‘Guy’ between them, and an overturned cap for the collected coins. They looked something like this group:

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the Gunpowder Plot or the holiday. I could not have foreseen the changing meanings and traditions or the relative decline of Bonfire night celebrations, although there are places – Lewes, for example – that continue to hold large events, now burning effigies of Trump, Putin, and other tyrannical figures. And yes, fireworks are still heard pounding and crackling during the dark nights of early November, though Halloween now jostles for position as the autumn holiday.

The kids on corners asking for pennies will be lost in time. Yet, that passing encounter of the little group in Finsbury Park during the harsh Thatcher years remains one of the strongest in my recollections of London, and still seems most vividly ‘English’ - a memory of kids, underdressed, feeling the cold, but joyously free for a few hours. Little rebels on London street corners and in the entrances to tube stations.

Both tune and lyrics are a weary lament for the passing of the dream, as though the lights were going out along the seaboard and westward. The past is dimming too. History moves through the lyrics. The Mayflower appears, as does the Statue of Liberty, now seen “sailing away to sea” by the song’s dreamer. “I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong,” he sings. Having declared himself confused, mistaken, battered, forsaken, and misused, the dreamer staggers to something of a hopeful conclusion.

Oh, and it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest

The song is a mournful letting-go but not a giving up. We keep going. “Many’s the time,” the song began. We shatter a dream to dream again. Differently. In 2022, while duetting with Rhiannon Giddens at Newport, Simon opted for a small, but honest and significant change to the fourth and final verse of American Tune.

Here then, is the updated version, explained and performed by Giddens at a later date:

A music historian as well as music maker, Rhiannon Giddens continues to bring us lost stories and remembered players in projects that began with the Black string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and includes Our Native Daughters (the all-female banjo group), as well as collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma, Ken Burns, and more.1

Here, as an added gift, is an extract from her wonderful History of the Banjo: From Black Roots to American Music.

U.S. history is rich in radicalism, labor and union struggles, socialist thought and experiment, abolitionism, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, anti-war activism, feminism, LGBTQ campaigns, indigenous-American activism, and in more recent years, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, green movements, and the revival of union organizing. Search any of these terms and you will find that Americans have been busy and impressive from the start. These movements have been researched and recorded by generations of historians and activists. The record is there, even if it is too often forgotten or suppressed by our mainstream media and our political parties and leaders.

In times of trouble, we need imagination too. Art and artists. Our cultural works.

So, should you tire of reading history, turn to the playwrights, novelists and poets; blues, folk, soul and jazz artists; our sporting heroes. Look at our independent cinema or the dissident subtexts buried in classic Hollywood films. There are hundreds of gems to uncover along the way, small and large finds that will leave any American wondering how we have allowed so much to be erased from our vision of ourselves and our progressive efforts as a people and nation.

We are again in a time of deep trouble. The Republic is in trouble. In the wake of relentless Trump-regime actions at home and abroad, people everywhere are in trouble. The planet is in trouble. It seems that each day brings new trouble. But each day brings stirrings too, memories of our better selves. Resistances large and small. They all matter.

Consider just the past two days.

Friday (March 14): Trouble. Ten Democratic Senators vote to advance the Republican spending bill, thereby assuring its passage before a government shutdown and handing a gift-wrapped victory to the MAGA Republicans. It is impossible not to read this as an act of betrayal of the House Democrats who stood firm against the partisan Trump/Musk-driven bill. As for the rest of us, we watch in anger and despair as the Democrats effectively issue

“a blank check for the administration and Mr. Musk to continue their savage war against working families, the elderly, children, the sick, and the poor in order to lay the groundwork for massive tax breaks for the billionaire class… This legislation will also provide a green light for the administration to continue its illegal and unconstitutional activities." (Bernie Sanders)1

Saturday (March 15): Stirrings. Americans across the country and beyond mark the Ides of March with a postcard campaign under the title, The Ides of Trump: “Let's inundate the White House with postcards telling Trump how we think he's doing… Bonus points for anything resembling a pink slip or with the connotation "you're fired!”

Postcard writers are encouraged to:

“sharpen your wit, unsheathe your writing implements and write from the heart. All of our issues — DAPL, women’s rights, racial discrimination, religious freedom, immigration, economic security, education, the environment, conflicts of interest, the existence of facts — can and should find common cause. That cause is to make it irrefutable that the president’s claim of wide support is a farce.”2

Trouble and stirrings. These are our rollercoaster times. This morning, I am inspired by childhood friends sharing their postcards on social media as part of this mass act of resistance, one that is creative and playful in the best senses, but serious too - a statement of our deep unhappiness about the state of the union.

In that spirit, I’m resurrecting my occasional postcards to share past moments of our musical history that brought - and bring us still - love, hope, imagination, and resistance.

To start, Stephen Foster’s Hard Times Come Again No More. Published in 1854, its lines “proved tragically prophetic for Foster, as it was reported that he sang this song quite often in his last days.” Foster died at the age of 37, with only 38 cents to his name.3

But we still sing it. A search for recordings of Hard Times delivered nearly 50 renditions of the song from the late 20th century to today.

Here’s the version I chose, dedicated to the postcard writers among my friends.

The Longest Johns hail from Bristol, UK. Please visit their wonderful site here.

To move to Brighton - a promise in itself - is to bring London closer. So before catching the London-bound train, here’s Postcard #20, one of my earliest memories of the Monster City: London 1976.

With good weekend wishes to readers and subscribers,

AmyK

“Baudelaire declared that dreamers like a severe winter.” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space)

It seemed fitting that the first photograph from my new abode in Brighton should be a wintry one of snow and houses. Gazing from my new window, I remembered not only my childhood love of snow but Bachelard’s line about Baudelaire. I had included it in an early Substack post about our remembered homes, dreaming, and Kodachrome.

Much has happened since that old post, in my private life and in the world. Of course, this must be so. But as I write today, I am thinking about the cruel preponderance of lost houses - from the prolonged, criminal destruction of Gaza to the climate-change-driven fires of Los Angeles, and many places besides.

If, as Bachelard contends, the houses of our memories take us back to “motionless childhood,” then what memories will come to those who lose their houses through violence, disaster, or injustice? And if the “chief benefit of the house” is that it “shelters day-dreaming, protects the dreamer, and allows one to dream in peace,” then surely our first thoughts must be with the surviving children of Gaza and all children who have lost their first and only-remembered houses.

So in truth, however challenging this past year, I am a lucky one. While I find my feet, my writings, my dreams in a new place, here then is that early post about Bachelard, houses, and Kodachrome: Slide Dreams

With love to all children hoping for a safe place to dream their dreams.

Thanks, as ever, to my dear friends Jean-Raymond and Marie-Paule, who first introduced me to Bachelard’s writings. (Avec mes remerciements, comme toujours, à mes chers amis Jean-Raymond et Marie-Paule, qui m'ont fait découvrir les écrits de Bachelard.)

Additional thanks to Zoe Matthews for her warm welcome to Brighton!

Here’s one from the archives and for new subscribers, the first entry in the Postcard series: Bob Rhodes, Crescent Street.

With thanks, as ever, for reading and subscribing,

AmyK

Christmas Day, 1909. Ina and Ernest Kenyon, newly married, at the family farm in western Michigan.

By the next generation, the family farm was gone. Ernest and Ina moved to Hastings, Michigan, and lived in various rented properties in the town as the family grew. They would have nine children. The boys’ names all began with R: Robert, Russell, Rex, Raymond, Richard, and Reginald; the girls’ names with L: Louise, Lois, and Leora Jean. All the children, except Reginald, lived to adulthood (and most of them to old age). Reginald died in infancy.

Ernest, their father, died in 1942 of a burst appendix, after refusing to see a doctor for severe abdominal pain. A few weeks earlier, the family had invited the high school basketball coach to dinner. My father, Raymond, was on the team.

The dinner would haunt my father. This is what he told me about it. He said that Ernest arrived late to the table that evening and was still wearing his work overalls. Since the Depression years, Ernest had relied mostly on casual jobs - farm work, and some hours as a janitor for the schools. At the table that evening, when Ernest (already late and in work-stained overalls) reached for the food, my father felt a deep embarrassment at the sight of dirt beneath Ernest’s fingernails.

When my dad learned of his father’s death, he hid behind the chimney outside the house and cried and thought about the night (only weeks before) when he felt ashamed of Ernest. My father did not tell me this story until his own old age. He said it still bothered him. He said he could never shake the memory of the moment he felt ashamed of Ernest.

Ernest was the only grandparent I never knew. Ina lived for another twenty years. Every December during my childhood, there was a large family reunion in Hastings and each grandchild (we were numerous in that already big family) received a little gift from her.

Ina scared me a little. She was stern. I once overheard her telling my mother to put something foul-tasting on my thumb so I would stop sucking it. Also, I believed death was in her house. When we stayed overnight there, I begged my parents to leave the hall lights on. Grandma Kenyon objected to this.

Looking back, I see that I never knew her. I was one of the youngest of dozens of grandchildren. I was not there for the lean years during which she learned to take care of herself. She was stubbornly independent and self-sufficient. Had I been older or known her longer, I might have understood her occasional severity. I might have known that what I saw, her own children did not. I might have understood why my father sat on our front step with tears in his eyes the day Ina died.

Finally, I think the scent of death that occasioned those childhood visits was to do with the loss of Ernest, a residue of grief in Ina’s rooms, and the fact that each visit included a trip to the gravestone. I was not helped by the fact that one year, I consumed too many chocolate-covered raisins and was sick when we went to the cemetery. Chocolate-covered raisins entered a child’s narrative and to this day, I cannot eat them.

But I would visit that old cemetery, so far away.

I spent my first two years of life in Dearborn, Henry Ford's hometown. In 1954, the year I was born, the family lived in a small, brick duplex house on Outer Drive, the 40-mile long road once described as a "necklace around Detroit." Outer Drive runs like a "jagged horseshoe from the East Side at Mack Avenue (the Detroit-Grosse Pointe Park border) to Jefferson Avenue in Ecorse Downriver," taking in parts of Dearborn and other western and downriver communities along the way.

By the time of my childhood, Dearborn was the site of Ford headquarters, the Ford estate at Fair Lane, the Rouge Plant, the Ford Rotunda, and Greenfield Village. These were the incongruous spaces of old Henry—a mix of industrial and architectural wonder, antipathy to Detroit (Ford considered himself a farm boy), race segregation (the notorious Orville Hubbard was Dearborn's mayor at the time), and vanity projects that became Disney-like fantasy sites.

My father was employed as a salesman for Stuart Wilson Ford, a Dearborn-based dealership dating from 1947. That job, together with the GI Bill, enabled him to take out a mortgage on a newly built box house in Garden City, a booming suburb fewer than ten miles west of Dearborn.

For me, life began in Garden City and I have been pining for it, some would say moaning about it, ever since:

“… that people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and call it home, and put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover…” (William Goyen, House of Breath)

But hang on. I came here to talk about Dearborn, the geographical prologue to Garden City. Suppressed, lost, formative. I have little memory of Dearborn, having moved away so young, but two of its places still feature as points on my retrospective maps: Stuart Wilson and the Ford Rotunda.

Stuart Wilson Ford was my father's "field of action," his place out in the world. I can still see him, made mysterious and important by his dark suit, his sober attire set against the candy-colored dream cars of the 50s. He moved among them, carrying a clipboard and pen. I made him important. Not long ago, I met a little girl in a French canal town. Her father sold fries from a broken-down van parked next to the canal. The girl's daughterly pride was fierce, sincere, and unguarded. She told me her father was the most important man in town because everybody came to the van, ordered fries, and talked to him about this and that. Even the mayor did not know what her father knew about the town and its people. I believed her. And I recalled an old sensation of my own, a flutter in the stomach whenever I caught sight of my father in his showroom, selling those bright, gas-guzzling cars.

With its rounded front window, the Stuart Wilson building made modest reference to the Rotunda. The latter was an Albert Kahn design, a massive cylinder-shaped structure to represent Ford Motor Company at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair.

After the Fair, the Rotunda was dismantled and moved to Dearborn where it became the Ford visitor center and, by the 1950s, the nation's fifth most popular tourist destination. The annual Christmas fantasy (with Ford's latest model cars never far from the scene) drew the 50s kids from Dearborn and beyond, attracting six million visitors across nine holiday seasons. Once inside the domed court of the building, we arched our backs to take in the Paul Bunyan-sized Christmas tree, its top branches miles away in the up-spaces. Making our way to Santa's workshop, we passed displays of fairy-tale figurines decked in velvety reds and fake snow.

Today, searching the Rotunda online, I find numerous photographs of the Christmas fantasy and peer at them until my eyes tire of the wretched quest for some record of myself in public history. Might I appear in these Kodachrome scenes of post-war children? The urge to find me is painful because I know that childhood memories turn increasingly elusive as we age. The past changes in shape and content. Momentous passages of youth lose definition or slip from our grasp, while seemingly insignificant ones assume an importance we never suspected at the time. Either way, we lose proof, evidence, and witnesses.

Our places find new uses as they are claimed by succeeding generations. Or they become derelict until they are bulldozed. The materiality of our history recedes or disappears altogether until what occupies us is the nature and practice of memory itself, the feel of memory. Of course, Freud told us long ago that memory is unstable throughout life, not only in old age:

It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves. (Freud, Screen Memories, 1899)

This instability becomes more difficult with age because we find ourselves more alone. Those who have shared our childhood begin to leave us, one way or another. Those who enter our lives later, well, they inhabit the scenes of future memory. We cannot expect them to care as much about where we came from. Sometimes there seems to be a reprieve when we fall in love. A face across the table in candlelight. Exchanges of heated questions and revelation, more authentic in some than others. "Tell me about your childhood. I want to know everything about you." If we are lucky, we may find this once or twice in life. But even the most ardent lovers gradually stop asking, and we stop asking, too. Love may bind us in other ways, but that particular desire diminishes.

Or consider our children and grandchildren who look forward, as they should. One day, they may feel inclined to look back or know more about who we were, but by then, we may be gone. Each generation experiences its own delayed family historical inquisitiveness. In time, our descendants will glimpse what we begin to know now. The loneliness of memory that has little reference point beyond itself, faint scratchings from behind a wall, a restless mind late at night. But we can't ask children to believe in loss at a time in life when all seems there to be gained, nor should we try.

So if I should find myself, find photographic evidence I was there at the Rotunda, what would it matter? Why persist in these futile searches? The Internet increases the compulsive quality of such longing. I click and google and click some more, and find dozens of little girls at the Rotunda, little Sally Drapers in smart winter coats, paused in front of the displays. I might be any one of them, but upon close inspection, I find I am not.

The retrospective suburban baby boomers embraced Mad Men for all sorts of reasons, but Sally Draper drew particular devotion. Sally stood in for our losses. She made the world young again. She made us young again. We, the girls especially, were Sally Draper. Sally and I were born at the same time. Sally and I lived in 50s suburbia with aspirational fathers and pretty homemaker-mothers. Our family, our house and yard, all these carried the air of perfection and disappointment that hangs so poignantly over the Draper household. I dressed like Sally, took ballet classes, and gave clumsy performances in the living room while my parents sipped Manhattans.

I gazed at my mother in her aprons and pastel nylon nighties. I loved her with a child's ferocity, but with a touch of reluctance, too, catching a whiff of surrender, a narrowing of opportunity that might come eventually to settle on me. Like Sally, I adored my father and longed to be adored in return. He had so much more range and power than my mother. Soon, he would leave Stuart Wilson and become a corporate accountant at Ford Headquarters. He was moving up, though never as high as the men described by Don Draper, Sally's father, as the "Detroit guys." In a later season, the Detroit guys flew to New York to hear pitches and prowl around.

Mad Men was first shown in 2007 when Sally Draper's real-life counterparts had recently passed our 50th birthdays. She tapped straight into our rampant and misguided nostalgia. We could be Sally again, before her (our) future arrived. But we found that she could not take away our knowledge of after. If anything, Sally was written (and beautifully played by Kiernan Shipka) to embody this dilemma for us: a world of before, forever seen through the lens of after.

With each episode, I longed to fade into Sally, and move through childhood as though it were the first time. I longed to erase the changes and events that I knew, full well, would soon disrupt all certainty about the world and unsettle Sally as they had unsettled me: assassinations, urban unrest, Vietnam, Woodstock, the Manson Family, Kent State. And it was not only these public events that troubled us. It was the sporadic glimpses of unhappiness closer to home and in family life. It was the creeping realization that our suburban streets and playgrounds, these lovely spaces for children, were not open to everyone and could not be disentangled from the fortunes of our nearest city, Detroit.

We view our childhoods through these public and private filters. Sally Draper was not there to remove them; she was there to remind us of them. With each season of Mad Men right up to its final episode in 2015, we felt for Sally and watched her growing knowledge and disillusion as though it were our own because it was our own.

The Ford Rotunda was destroyed by fire in November, 1962 and never rebuilt.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in Eclectica Magazine in 2016.

It’s the winter of 1979-80. By the time I find myself living in Willesden Green, the Kinks song (1971) has been and gone. I won’t discover it until decades later by which time it won’t seem very Kinks-like.

The Willesden Green I know in 1979 is mostly terrace houses divided into flats and bedsits. We have what we need: a corner shop, a greengrocer, couple of pubs and breakfast cafés, and the tube station. I am working in a print shop off Fleet Street. I travel by tube every day, returning home to Willesden Green Station. Anyone can fall in love with London Underground. I do.

But I haven’t lived long in the flat-share in Willesden Green. London remains old and strange to me. Had I studied History by now, I might say that England – to this young American – is like stepping into the long post-war. But that’s not quite right. Thatcherism has come. The cold, damp, black-and-whiteness of the place possesses something – we don’t yet know what – to do with Thatcher’s vision of Britain. It is the turning from the postwar period to something that would prove hard as if by choice, cruel in its unique way.

The flat is a refrigerator. I teach myself to live without central heating. The first task upon returning home from work is to make a coal fire. Don’t wait. Don’t take off your coat under the mistaken impression that you’ll be able to face it later. You won’t. Make the fire now. Other things can wait: food, drink, life, thinking. You start with firelighters, kindling if you have it, rolled up newspapers. Put your match to them. Add coal strategically. Don’t rush this step or you risk going back to cold-jail immediately. Before the firelighters and kindling have gone out, spread open a page of yesterday’s Guardian and hold it over the chimney opening to encourage the small fire you are birthing. Behind the page which you find yourself reading again, you’ll hear the flames suck and pop and leap. You’re waiting for the fire to grab the coals irreversibly. When the paper begins to scald, press it into a ball and add it to the fire, making sure it doesn’t fly up the chimney. A skilled fire builder may only need one sheet of newspaper. I am not skilled.

An hour later, I am eating a Fray-Bentos pie and drinking a glass of red wine that I have warmed in a saucepan on the gas cooker.

We have a box television next to the fire. I watch the news and Top of the Pops. In January, 1980, the Specials are on:

I don’t know it yet, but the Specials will forever be in my mind. They will be this moment. Willesden Green. The flat like a refrigerator. Making fires night after night. Early jobs in London. Falling in love with the tube. Falling in love with the city. Music and the resistance to Thatcherism.

The Willesden Green year that starts with the Specials ends with them, rocking their Christmas jumpers, again on Top of the Pops.

Not long after that, I move from Willesden Green to Finsbury Park. The Rainbow Theatre, best of old gig palaces, is only down the road.

One day, I will lose count of the bands I see there, most of them with a close friend. In May 1981, she and I see the Specials together. By the end of the year, the great concert period at the Rainbow will be over. The last gig, on Christmas Eve, is Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

It’s 2022. I experience a terrible longing to pick up the phone, all these years later, and say to my friend, “Terry Hall has died. Do you remember when we saw the Specials at the Rainbow?” But she won’t remember and this might confuse and upset her because she is losing her memory. Very fast now. I don’t pick up the phone.

But when I manage to see her, sometimes I tell her things we did together, almost as though they are stories in which we are the young characters. She takes pleasure in these. She says, “Really? Did I do that?” And I assure her that she did.

Without taking issue with Orwell or Arendt, I confess to a longstanding soft spot for Malick’s view. It is our vulnerability as humans that sometimes causes us to reach for a cliché, a shorthand,  worn-out line yet a comforting truth of sorts, that we believe to be shared by others. We repeat clichés for the ‘camaraderie of understanding’ they seem to promise.

Normandy is haunted in the usual sense, by old European places – churches, abbeys, castle ruins, the Bayeux tapestry, but also by the more recent history of the D-Day landings. That the French retained the original allied code names given to the landing beaches, that they erected monuments, war memorials, and museums, maintained military cemeteries, and named streets and cafés after generals – all this weighs upon visitors to Normandy, generally producing the cliché with which I began. It is a place haunted by history. I come here expecting ghosts. But this time, something occurred to make the haunting different from previous visits.

We arrived as night fell. We’d had car trouble on the road. The house is in the countryside in the area known as Contentin in Basse-Normandie. The nearest town is Picauville, to the west of Sainte-Mère-Église. The next morning, unable to drive anywhere until the mechanic examined the car, I decided to walk into Picauville. The sun shone warmly for a late November day and I set out in good spirits, happy as always to be in France.

I had not gone a half mile down the lane when I came upon this set of old farm buildings.

I was thinking about the flat-shaped pumpkin and wondering about Halloween in France when I noticed a small American flag flapping in the breeze on the roadside of the old grange. It was attached to a commemorative plaque, something you find in all kinds of surprising locations around Normandy towns.

Why did this plaque cause me to shudder? I suppose I hadn’t expected one so immediately upon setting out for my walk. My mind had not fully arrived in France. It was on English time. But the more important reason was the rural setting of this particular commemoration. I couldn’t help but wonder if people noticed it anymore.

I walked over to it. I read the narrative, so persistent in these parts, that they “gave their lives for freedom.” Here is a cliché harder to accept without qualification. Yes, it delivers a comforting truth of sorts, given the facts of the Normandy landings. But it is also close to Hannah Arendt’s definition: a code that elides numerous ‘realities’. How each soldier died, the bloody facts of it, what he thought, believed, feared, desired. What the enemy soldier thought, believed, feared, and desired. What about the farm’s inhabitants? The grief of families and whole towns. Did ‘dying for freedom’ enter any minds during the minutes of these deaths?

How simple and innocent our questions become when death is at the heart of them. How humbled we are, the humans. I could almost feel myself falling into childhood there, alone on that spot. So, I read what mattered most, the names of the soldiers who had died in this place. I looked up and down the narrow road, void of cars and houses. I stood there a long time. I realized I was waiting.

A disorder of thoughts followed, yet each the same in one aspect: they reminded me of Jacques Derrida’s borrowing from Shakespeare:

“The time is out of joint.” (Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 1993)

As I waited motionless on the Normandy road, my time was out of joint. It was as if my pasts and the futures of my pasts (in other words, my later pasts) were dancing in and out of the present.

First, the tiny fluttering flag. I’ve never been a flag waver. My patriotism, such as it is, finds James Baldwin’s approach more amenable than flags and anthems: a deep love of my country, and I assure you, mine is deep, “insists on the right to criticize her...” (Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955). I left America at the age of eighteen, spending five years in France, then the next decades back and forth between England and the U.S. As of now, I have lived more years of my life outside America than in it. I can recall – like it was yesterday – the first time I saw how terribly naïve we Americans tend to be. A fellow university student asked me in French how it felt to come from a feared or hated nation. He did not ask it with animosity, or any personal criticism directed at me. No, he was careful to make a distinction between the U.S. government and its people. But he signaled something I did not know way back then. Not everybody thought the U.S. was a grand and wonderful and respectful-of-other-nations kind of place. Our culture, our music, film, and literature - these were and still are loved and admired. Our politics, less so. During the following years, I gradually learned why. More specifically, I learned about U.S. foreign policy since the period of the Second World War.

So, here was this tiny U.S. flag down a lane in Normandy. With its plaque a reminder of a time before, the year 1944. A year when I would likely not have been asked the question my fellow student would put to me later, in the early 1970s. I’ve had this experience before, having crossed northern France many times since those student days, only to meet old people with war memories who wanted to thank me because I was American, and Americans had liberated their towns. Each of these occasions came as a poignant surprise that brought tears, together with a longing for us to be seen as the “good guys” and sadness that it should ever be otherwise and that the world has not remained peaceful.

“The time is out of joint. The world is going badly.” (Derrida, Spectres of Marx)

---

So, there was this moment about the flag. Then, I thought about my father. He landed in Normandy, not in the first terrifying wave of June 6, 1944, but soon after. He was part of the reinforcements and supplies that followed. I know very little of his experiences in Normandy, only that he was here for a while, then stationed in Paris after its liberation.

My heart ached for him there on that road. I wanted to bring him back to life, find him waiting – always in the same spot - in the little local airport in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I got off planes to visit my parents in their later years. If I could hear his voice again and watch him move through the world with astonishing joy and competence even as he lost his sight. If I could speak French with him over a glass of Burgundy like we used to do. I wondered if his ghost might be present right now, at this very time and place: me standing before a memorial to twenty-one dead soldiers. Had he passed this way in 1944? Could I be, at this moment, standing in faint imprints made by my father’s footsteps? Had he left a residue on these immediate surroundings, as he had left a residue in me?

It was as if all my fathers returned at once: the high school basketball star I could only imagine from old photos, the soldier-father before my birth, the father-father, strong and loving, of my childhood. Then, the fading father of my adulthood. The dead father of today. His ages, my ages. It was as if they lost linearity and came back now in a mass to unsettle me, give me hope, withdraw, and leave me lonely. The road where I stood, halfway to Picauville, was teeming with fathers and ages.

“The time is out of joint… Old age or youth – one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age.” (Derrida)

---

Okay, I am being fanciful with Derrida’s text about ghosts, but my humble defense is I am certainly not the first to do so. Spectres of Marx (1993), originally composed for a conference on the future of Marxism, takes as its initial point of reference the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.” In 1993, the apparent defeat of most historical forms of Marxism seemed complete. But Derrida’s ‘hauntology’ proposed the historical promise of Marxism (and our unknown futures) as persistent hauntings of the late-capitalist present. Derrida’s ghosts were a “seething presence acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.” (A. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2008). Derrida’s ghosts offered an “address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future.” (C. Davis, Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms, 2005)

And the text lends itself to meanderings such as mine:

“…this being-with spectres would also be a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations… It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it… no ethics… seems possible… that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer, or for those who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.” (Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 1993)

In hauntology then, we are asked to resist our usual attempts to sever our present from its spectral pasts and futures, to see the traces of each one in the others and bring them into hopeful interplay. The current state of our world, with extinction threatened for so many beings including, ultimately, ourselves and our planet, makes Derrida’s vision all the more pressing.

A ghost is “what makes the present waver…Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist… all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity…” (Fredric Jameson, Marx’s Purloined Letter, 1999)

So now, we might interrogate those old clichés – notions of place haunted by history, dying for freedom, and no doubt many more – by giving greater presence to beings that died and beings yet to come. Derrida introduces his piece with this tantalizing line: “Someone, you or me, comes forward and says, I would like to learn to live finally.”

He continues:

“If it – learning to live – remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone…The time of the ‘learning to live’… would amount to this: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship… of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them… the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.” (Derrida, 1993)

---

The time is out of joint; O curs'd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

Nay come, let’s go together.

(Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5)

Immanuel Kant noted that when homesick people revisit the places of their youth, “they are greatly disappointed in their expectations and so cured. Though they think this is because everything has changed there, it is really because they cannot relive their youth there.” (For more about the history and meanings of homesickness and nostalgia, see my 2018 paper given at the Freud Museum: A Short History of Nostalgia.)

This is true, of course, even if my ailment about Northampton was never exactly homesickness. That is reserved for other locations. Northampton is not my childhood home, my site of family and earliest memories.

Northampton is someplace other. Site of my earliest leavings. My changes. Think about it. You likely have them too. Two or three places that first drew you away from home (generating that primary homesickness) only to produce, in time, their own significance and bittersweet pathologies.

We take to the road, light out for the territory, to borrow from Mr. Twain. These are journeys of the youthful self: escape, separation, desire, and creation. So, for me, Northampton was one of a few places that made leaving home magical and transformative. It was Oz, rather than Kansas.

What ails me then, when I hear the word ‘Northampton’, is a ‘leaving-home-sickness’. A longing for life’s meaningful locations, and the people and histories associated with them. The word conjurs a time as much as a place. And Kant’s statement applies in one respect: we cannot relive our pasts in our other/later worlds any more than we can go back to the original home and recover what once was.

Yet, the butterflies persist. They stir when I dream about the town or tap out the letters of its name. In winter, the season I loved most there, the butterflies turn to snowflakes. They’re flurrying now.

Here’s the Northampton snow song, discovered on YouTube by accident a few years back. The fellow who made this film and put it to Valley Winter Song by Fountains of Wayne, once promised me never to take it down. My thanks. xx

It’s 1976. I’m young. The National Theatre is newly open and a lot of people hate it. It’s “an aesthetic of broken forms,” writes one tentatively hopeful critic, while Prince Charles complains that it looks like a nuclear power station. But I like it. Grey concrete, layered horizontals, sharp angles, immense, complex. A city itself. A city for the monster city.

I find a job in the actors’ canteen. Meet the French boy who carries pocket editions of Baudelaire, Eluard, Rimbaud, and Verlaine. Not a bad start, I tell myself. But I’m still a kid from Michigan, a Dorothy astray, not knowing whether to stay or go, what’s humbug and what’s not.

The actors arrive during intermission. They’re in costume, playing Shakespeare, Beckett, and Marlowe, but we watch them eat. One night, here is Ralph Richardson.

“What have you got for pudding?” he booms, jovial but commanding.

I dare not check the menu board behind me. I work from memory, like an actor.

We’ve got Trite,” I say, certain this is what I have read on the menu.

Ralph glances above my head at the board, then laughs. Heartily and long, but descending into tenderness.

______________________

Trite. Adjective. (Of a remark) lacking originality or freshness.

Trifle. Noun. A thing of little value or importance. British: a cold dessert of sponge cake and fruit covered with layers of custard, jelly, and cream.

______________________

I’d not heard of Trifle, but it’s what I served Ralph that day, together with a helping of lexical muddle. Thereafter, when he came through the canteen, Ralph would look for me and - with fond voice and smile - ask if we had any Trite for pudding.

Ralph Richardson and a French draft refuser were my first Londoners. They’re gone now. I’m gone too. But the National Theatre is still there. Thank goodness for buildings. And Trifle.

This long estrangement has never been a bad thing. Just interesting. Another variation of the mental shifts we experience when we leave home to live in another culture. It’s been the making of me, for better or worse. First, it has altered my relationship with America. It made me love my birthplace like a lost treasure, mythologize it, and sometimes view it as though the whole thing were a film. From Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Frank Capra to David Lynch, the Coens, Terrence Malick, Kelly Reichardt, and more. Yet when the house lights come up, I know that I am conflicted about my homeland. I have grown an ‘outsider’s eye’ and attached it to an insider’s past. And the more ‘past’ my past becomes, the more bewildering America seems.

Perhaps this growing bewilderment has helped bring about a recasting of things here on English ground. I can’t but notice that some subtle shift has occurred - say over the past decade. A realization that despite my frequent declarations about how utterly incomprehensible England is, some deeper knowledge was forming. Not the knowledge of one born here. Not the ingrained knowledge of regions and accents and class slights and divides. Not the grasp of those classic things we talk about – British reserve, eccentricity, concealed meanings. I have a sense of these, even a competence in many of them, but they remain foreign in my mind.

But yes, knowledge comes, even if it hides beneath everyday consciousness. And more than that, affection comes. I am now regularly struck by waves of love for the UK. As with America, it is not uncritical, but it is surprisingly fierce. It’s a love of landscapes and people. Early friends here and recent ones too. Footpaths in Yorkshire and Devon and Scotland. Particular London bus routes and tube lines. The NHS. The BBC, for all its flaws. Labour party meetings that got out of hand. Pub gatherings after Labour party meetings that got out of hand.

Soldered to these general affections, there are tiny incidents that still burn brightly in my memory. Moments of small cultural learning. Particular bad-tasting cups of tea made to punctuate arrivals, meetings, minor crises - the sentences and paragraphs of British time. Last orders in the pub. A mate who, years before digital television and iPlayer, used to cover his muted television on Saturday evenings in order to avoid seeing the football results before Match of the Day. Visiting my dear friend, Rachel, when she lived in Brixton. Waking early to pop to her local newsagent and before I could speak, the guy behind the counter said, “Guardian?” And we both laughed. There are hundreds of these incidents, if only I would stop to catalogue them.

But it’s the fifth of November, as I write this. I recall a cold November evening in 1979. Everything here, however old to the surrounding culture, was new to me. I was exiting Finsbury Park tube station when I heard the kids calling, “Penny for the Guy.” They looked something like this group:

I knew nothing about the Gunpowder Plot. But since that night in 1979 when I first heard of it, there has been a slow decline in Bonfire night celebrations, though there are places – Lewes, for example – that still hold large events.

The kids on corners asking for pennies, I think they will soon be lost to memory. More than the night itself, this is the recollection that remains strongest and seems most ‘English’ - this image of kids, underdressed, feeling the cold, but joyously free for a few hours. Little rebels on London street corners and in the entrances to tube stations.

The Packard Plant is in the news again, its demolition moving forward. In truth, Packard sent me a postcard back in 1957, when I was too young to understand it. Here, in brief, is the story of that first postcard.

My father was civic-minded. Having bought his first house, a small brick bungalow in the Detroit suburb of Garden City, he soon became active on the local School Board and, later, the campaign to establish Schoolcraft Community College. Although he worked for Ford, it was through Garden City, the 1944 GI Bill, the subsequent suburban boom, and his membership of the school board that our history would brush that of Packard.

Born in 1925, Dad graduated from high school in 1943 and went to war. As a veteran, he was able to complete his education with help from the GI Bill, obtaining a business degree, and soon thereafter, his first job with Ford Motor Company. In 1954 (the year of my birth), Dad purchased the newly built Garden City house priced at $11,950, with a 30-year mortgage at 4 percent interest. So we moved from Henry Ford’s Dearborn to a rapidly growing box house suburb less than 20 miles west of Detroit. Our new home consisted of 940 square feet of living space set on lots 60 feet wide and 110 feet deep, the backyard plots demarcated by chain link fencing.

The GI Bill had introduced a new form of veterans’ compensation in the provision of long-term, low-interest mortgage loans. The construction industry was the immediate beneficiary and soon began adopting Fordist mass-production strategies. The Levitts, perhaps the best known of the postwar developers (Levittowns), perfected an assembly-line approach to house-building that at its peak meant the completion of 35 houses per day, the equivalent of a new house every 15 minutes. Between 1950 and 1970, America’s suburban population doubled, and the 1970 census showed (for the first time) more suburbanites than city-dwellers or farmers.

What, you may wonder, has all this got to do with postcards from the old Packard Plant? To which, I am tempted to answer, “Follow the money.”

You may recall that in the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, this line was uttered by “Deep Throat” in an underground car park meeting with Bob Woodward, one of the Washington Post journalists seeking to unravel the Watergate mystery. The implication was that a trail of dirty money leading to higher and higher echelons of the federal government would eventually reveal the powerful source of the Watergate conspiracy and a deeply entrenched culture of government corruption.

It’s an endlessly serviceable line. What happens if you apply it to suburbanization? If you think about the suburban boom of the 1950s and ‘60s as a kind of conspiracy? As in most conspiracies, there is no one truth that can be grasped, no single plot to be discovered and accused. A conspiracy is not so much the product of articulated intent, but more an outcome of actions that appear to need no conscious coordination - because those actions are undertaken by disparate, nameless partisan interests. The co-conspirators never really know one another. Their wishes are fulfilled through a series of interlocking and overlapping moves, acts, and seemingly random events. At times, they sense they are guilty, part of some problem. But most of the time, they experience themselves as simply reacting to historical events or to the market.

They follow the money; the money follows them. Capital “flows to wherever the rate of return is highest.” (David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, 1973) Or listen to a description from the ground: speaking of his life in postwar Detroit, Auburey Pollard Sr., father of one of the young black men murdered by police in the Algiers Motel (July, 1967) remarked: “You can see the money moving.” (John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident, 1968 & 1998)

Malcolm X once said that “it’s impossible to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.” (See Robert L. Allen, A Guide to Black Power in America, 1970) Like Harvey and Pollard (in their different accounts), Malcolm X is linking the operations of both. If then, we follow capital, follow the money in order to map the spaces of metropolitan Detroit in the postwar period, we arrive at a more complete realization that suburbanization had a great deal to do with northern geographies of racism. Here, practices of redlining, zoning, and white neighourhood resistance provide the detailed backdrop to a story that can only be titled Disinvestment. What does that mean?

We may recall that, in the aftermath of the 1950s suburban boom, the radical geographer, William Bunge, wrote that the suburbs had sucked money out of Detroit “like lamprey eels suck the juices out of Michigan lake trout.” (Bunge, Fitzgerald: The Geography of a Revolution, 1971). In Bunge’s account, disinvestment was the draining of the city’s industry, commerce, and residence, and indeed the shrinking of its tax base, as all of these flowed to the (white) suburbs. This is a spatial enactment of the ‘follow-the-money’ thesis. To make sense of the postwar history of Detroit (and other U.S. cities), disinvestment must be understood as a redistribution of funds, resources, rights, political power, and cultural authority along racially segregated lines.

Garden City was perfectly positioned to benefit from postwar industrial and commercial suburbanization, in other words, from the processes described above. (See Chapter 7 of Amy Kenyon, Dreaming Suburbia) With its proximity to Dearborn, and with other manufacturing plants and warehouse facilities relocating from Detroit to nearby industrial corridors, Garden City’s growth was assured. Complementary metal and machinery industries and retailers developed around these plant sites. Here, in numbers, is the impact on Detroit during that period:

“Between the late 1940s and the early 1980s, Detroit’s share of the region’s manufacturing employment dropped from 60.3 percent to 25 percent, retail trade from 72.6 percent to 15.4 percent, services from 75.3 percent (in 1958) to 23.6 percent…’ See Joe T. Darden, Richard Child Hill, June Thomas, and Richard Thomas, Detroit: Race and Uneven Development (1987).

In Garden City, some gains were straightforward and expected, such as the award of a $1 million contract to a local electrical parts company by the Chrysler Corporation. Other benefits were more like small, sad commentaries on changing times, such as the school board purchase, in 1957, of the opulent boardroom furniture from Packard, by then, a failing Detroit car company:

“Superintendant O’Leary, hearing that the Packard Motor Company was in a state of liquidation, arranged for the massive board-of-directors table, with a goodly number of carved chairs, to be purchased for our board meetings. The set of chairs and tables was originally said to have cost $700, a substantial sum back then.” (John Macfie, Garden City Chronicle, 1976)

And so came my first postcard from Packard. I was three years old, unaware that my father was sitting at that table, on those carved chairs, and certainly unaware that these had come from a Detroit car company on the skids to a suburb on a roll.

In the 1950s, Garden City funded school after school, state-of-the-art one-story facilities with flagpoles and large blackboards, slide projectors, gyms, hundreds of little chairs and desks, shiny lockers, and yellow-painted Ticonderoga pencils. Empire builders always make the mistake of assuming it will last forever.

When I returned to Garden City in the 1990s, an affecting silence had settled on the old classrooms and playgrounds. The baby boom was a distant memory, as long ago as tail fins on cars and strap-on roller skates to carry us along the sidewalks.

As for Packard, its latest postcard brings the news, this month, of that long-expected demolition.

We give the final word to Philip Levine, poet of working-class Detroit once described as “a large, iconic Whitman of the industrial heartland” (Edward Hirsch). Levine contributed to the 2014 film Packard: The Last Shift. He died a year later. Here is the stunning video/poem, the most poignant of Packard postcards, as part of the film’s preview:

Packard: The Last Shift

But just when the automobile was set to change Detroit forever, Fred lost his parents in terrible circumstances. In 1904, his father committed suicide and two years later, his mother died in Eloise, the notorious poorhouse turned ‘insane asylum’. 

George Granger came from a once-wealthy Detroit family, so the drama of his demise merited a piece in the Detroit Free Press. The family story held that it was George who lost the family fortune, and this led to his depression and suicide, though there are no available records showing when or how the family fell on hard times.

The record of Catherine’s death, cruelly scant, reads as follows:

Catherine Ballentine (Fred’s mother had remarried after her divorce from George)
Birthplace:
Late Residence: Eloise
Birthdate:
Date of Death: February 8, 1906

Age Years: 39
Months:
Days:
Hours:
Minutes:

Gender:
Disease: Exhaustion Melancholen
Burial Date: February 10,1906
Section Name: E
Section: Block 6
Grave Number: 64

Apart from the listed cause, melancholia, we see only the date of death and the indifferent geography of Eloise cemetery with its nameless plots and ordering into sections and blocks. Grave number 64, Block 6, Section E. Catherine was among the first burials there. More than 7000 patients would be buried at Eloise between 1910 and 1948. Effectively, it was the local “Potter’s Field”, a publicly run burial site for unclaimed dead (did no one come to claim Catherine?) subject to the additional humiliation of cadaver-snatching by University of Michigan medical students. (Frank Capra viewers will recall that Potter’s Field was the name given to the villainous Henry Potter’s housing development for poor people.)

So, at the age of fourteen, Fred was orphaned. He inherited the pocket watch mentioned in George Granger’s death notice but nothing else of value. He lived with his older brother Charles until 1918 when Charles died from a ruptured appendix.

The 1910 Census lists Fred’s occupation as draughtsman, but I was always told that he got a job as a driver soon after his parents died and in those early days of the automobile. His draft registration card (1917) lists him as a chauffeur for B.E. Taylor, the wealthy real estate developer behind the Brightmoor neighborhood in Detroit.

Fred married Audrie Chase who came from Middleville, Michigan. How he came to meet a country girl from the western farmlands is not known, but after my mother’s birth in 1919, the family left Detroit to live in Audrie’s hometown.

I still think of Fred as the ‘true and last Detroiter’ in our family. That his early life coincided with the beginnings of the automobile and Tiger baseball may help to explain my fascination for both these pieces of old Detroit. Certainly, automobiles and the Tigers figure in photos that were passed down to me.

In 1954, I was born in Henry Ford’s hometown of Dearborn, Michigan. Dad worked for Ford, first as a car showroom salesman, then gradually moving up the corporate ranks to work at Ford headquarters: the Glass House in Dearborn and later, the John Portman-designed Renaissance Center in Detroit.

In 1978, Dad showed me around his brand-new Renaissance Center office, explaining that each floor represented a salary grade, with Henry Ford II occupying the entire top floor. Each of the floors below had open-plan cubicles surrounded by private offices with windows above the river and city. When we walked by a cubicle desk with one of those little signs: I’d rather be fishing, Dad said, “That guy’ll never get a window office.”

There was sadness in that private tour of the Renaissance Center. Not only in its reveal of the corporate culture – and architecture – that my father had learned to navigate but in the era itself. The auto industry was only a year away from the 1979 oil crisis and Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech. Indeed, the term malaise era would be used to describe the U.S. automotive industry during the 1970s.

I remember thinking that the Renaissance Center seemed a jarring divergence from the Detroit cityscape and a portent of further decline, rather than the promise of a Motor City comeback. The glory days were gone. In truth, they began during the Model T era and reached their most brash and colorful during the immediate postwar years. When Model Ts flowed off the first moving assembly line (1914) at the Highland Park Plant, Henry Ford famously remarked that customers could have any color they wanted, as long as it was black. By the 1950s and ‘60s, the years of my childhood, such sobriety was jettisoned in favor of the garish tones of postwar bubble gum packed with additives and dyes. Sticky pinks and yellows and turquoises. The cars were damn near as big as our brick bungalow houses on the edge of Detroit.

As a Ford brat, I played with the toy Thunderbirds and Lincoln Continentals brought home by my father. We rolled the plastic models along the griddle-hot summer pavement in imaginary Barbie and Ken scenarios. The neighborhood kids liked to perch on car bumpers, metallic heat warming our thighs while we talked about the death of Marilyn or the Cuban Missile Crisis or when the ice cream truck was due. Nighttime, at the drive-in, we ate popcorn in the backseat, dressed in our pyjamas, while our parents watched the movie. When a Christmas morning surprise went awry one year, and Dad told us to wait in our room because Santa’s sleigh was “stalled” in the front yard and he was waiting for a mechanic, we believed him. Forget the reindeer. In Michigan, Santa ran on gasoline.

Years later, far from Michigan, I saw that my sense of self and my cultural passions had been shaped by these automotive spaces. Ford, GM, and Chrysler had bound themselves perfectly to notions of Manifest Destiny and to the idea that if you don’t like a place, you move to a new place. You get in your car and drive away. Westerns and road movies. If you do like a place, you just drive around it a lot, call it home, distort it, and develop an unhealthy obsession about it. Frank Capra movies. The Beach Boys. I Get Around was never I Get Away, though it made us believe we were free. And surely Don’t Worry Baby is the most beautiful car song ever penned.

Finally, if Frank Capra asked us to imagine what Bedford Falls would have been like without George Bailey, I can’t help but wonder what my world might have been without the invention of the automobile. Right back to Fred Granger, the last Detroiter in the family, who became an orphan just as the car was being born. My story is inseparable from his, and his, inseparable from the story of the Motor City. It’s a story that reaches back to Henry Ford and the Tin Lizzie. The Piquette Avenue, Highland Park, and Rouge plants all lay in the path of Grandad’s story and mine. So too, the moving assembly line, immigration and notions of the Melting Pot, the Great Migration of black workers to the northern factory towns, the Depression, the Wars, the GI Bill, and the suburban boom, right through to my father’s executive career at corporate headquarters.

By my lifetime, automobiles had transformed the metropolitan landscape and the fortunes of the city that had once grown rich on them. The young roads that cut across the woodland surrounding Detroit enabled suburbanization and northern forms of segregation. Money flowed along those roads, unfairly, away from Detroit, to take root in building plots and housing developments for white people. Shopping malls and fast-food places followed, all of these enabled by cars and roads. 

There were private wounds closer to home. There was, for example, my father’s admission in later years that he had never really cared for cars. My teenage lack of appreciation for the sacrifices he made. Much later, after the crash of 2008, there was the removal of many of his hard-earned retirement benefits. The guy who gave his working life to Ford in the belief he would never endure what his father had endured during the Great Depression would end that life with a final injury. Oh, the small print of the automotive dream.

I rarely drive these days. Here in England, I walk and use public transport. The gas guzzlers are - we now accept - not good for the planet. Yet, it seems I can never stop thinking about automobiles. I still want my big brother to drive me to Cloverdale’s for a peppermint ice cream. I want to blast the radio on an open road through cornfields. I’m forever looking for cars in literature and film. The pickings are rich. Road movies, gangster and noir stories, tales of getaways. Unions and strikes and picket lines. Strip malls, novels about suburban malaise.

And outlasting all of them, The Magnificent Ambersons. Here, all the ambivalence I have come to feel about the automobile – all my love and loathing – are forewarned. I return again and again to one of cinema’s most beautifully rendered scenes in which George Minniver tells Joseph Cotton’s handsome inventor and early car manufacturer that “automobiles are a useless nuisance. Never amount to anything but a nuisance and they had no business to be invented.” Because he is courting George’s widowed mother, the hostility of the son is an obstacle, and Joseph Cotton is wounded by the remark. But being a far gentler hero than Henry Ford, he cedes to the son, and in his wistful reply, the future decay of the Ambersons’ world is foreshadowed:

When the arrogant George finally gets his comeuppance, the townspeople who once prayed for it are either dead or scattered by the cars and roads that had turned the town into sprawl. It is a final insult that George is felled by an automobile, the invention he once described as a useless nuisance. The film, made in 1942, became part of Hollywood legend after the studio vandalized it, cutting and destroying some of the original footage shot by Orson Welles, changing the ending. But I love it anyway, this story marked by deep ambivalence, unsure whether the old small-town complacency of the Amberson era was better or worse than the automotive age that followed.

For my grandfather, Fred Granger

It is a cliché, I know, but Americans live in their cars in ways that others do not. We tend to romance our cars. Marry them. For better or worse, sickness and health, and all that. Most of us can recall one or two cars that reside at the heart of a personal drama - one we long to recapture or long to forget. I have already written of Cathy, cars, and photography (see Postcard #15). Certainly, with both Cathy and Ron, drives in and around Northampton and western Massachusetts provided key spaces for our early alliances. Not so with Danny. His was more of a friendship on foot. Yet, in the end, I cannot remember him without the intrusive thought of an unwanted automobile.

Ron

In contrast to Cathy, Ron’s life-in-the-car was loose, disorganized, surprising. More about the interior, its vinyl seats and floor littered with cigarette packets and candy wrappers. Unseat-belted, we moved around inside the car while Ron drove, shifting right or left on the long seats, climbing from back seat to front or vice versa. With Ron, destinations held little importance. We drove without planned routes. Around town or out to the Berkshires, collecting friends, strangers, and hitchhikers. Packing the car with people. With the top down on Ron’s old convertible, we shouted to be heard above the constant whoosh of air. Our words flew away with the cigarette papers. Hair and clothes snapped and mutinied. The radio, crackling in the wind, played Blondie and Elvis Costello.  That was summer.

In winter, behind frosted windows with the heater at full strength, we lit cigarettes and talked about movies. The morning after the blizzard of 1978, Ron’s car had disappeared beneath a snowdrift outside his apartment. When we clambered onto the snowdrift to find the car, someone put a foot through the convertible roof. I’m not sure the roof was ever repaired, but the car lasted until Ron left Massachusetts for warmer climes. Ron lasted. His dog, Myshkin, lasted.

Without Ron, there are writers, musicians, bands, and filmmakers that I would likely never have encountered. His cultural passions were feverish and wide-ranging. We started a local film club, its projects drawn from Ron’s knowledge of avant-garde and indie cinema. Without him, I would not have met and learned about Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka. I would not have gone disco dancing at the Hadley Mall with Walk on the Wild Side’s Holly (who “came from Miami, F.L.A. / Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.”)

And Ron would prove my first temptation away from Northampton and the East Coast. When he moved to Los Angeles, Ricardo and I followed later. We had plans to write a film script but instead went to parties and punk clubs. His apartment was filled with records, empty record sleeves, and books. We ate at Canter’s on Fairfax Avenue, or the small Korean place opposite Canter’s, or El Coyote, where (I would later learn) Sharon Tate had her last meal.

One day, I arrived for a writing session to find the phone ringing on the driveway outside Ron’s flat. In a temper about something, he had thrown the phone out the window. A neighbor put the receiver back so that he might still receive calls. Moody and easily angered, Ron was also affectionate, generous, and insanely smart. He was, you might say, a man of big brain. So, his bouts of silliness often came as a relief. As in this joke he liked to tell:

“Amy, you know that Sinatra song, One More for the Road?”

“Yes, I know that one, Ron.”

“Well, here are the real lyrics: it’s quarter to three, there’s no one in the place ‘cept you and me. So… stick ‘em up, Joe.”

If you were lucky enough to know Ron, your world was bigger, if sometimes chaotic. He always had someone you must meet, a book you must read, a band you must hear. His last gift to me was a volume of poetry by A.R. Ammons, arriving this past year, as his health declined further. We kept contact – on and off – throughout his illness. Finally, death grew impatient. Long in coming, but shocking when it came. We prepare for loss, and yet we don’t.

I like to think he is with Myshkin, the first dog I remember, and Tallulah, his last dog. He had vivid dreams about Tallulah during his final months and told me about them. In life, where Ron was, there was usually a dog nearby.

Danny

Apart from an outing to a maple sugar farm in the Berkshires, I recall almost no drives with Danny. I have no image or memory of his car. Danny was a friend on foot. Our meetings were on the street, in our apartments, over breakfast at Jake’s or a beer and a Celtics game at Joe’s or the Bay State Hotel. Northampton names and places.

Yet Dan’s story would become a cruel one of cars and roads. Hit by a drunk driver in 1991, he was in a coma for several days. When he finally left the hospital, he was wheelchair-bound. Danny worked long and hard to regain his physical mobility, and with some success. But in 2019, he fell backward in his wheelchair, damaging his cervical spine. This last setback impacted his ability to speak and left him permanently bedridden.

What the reader may now be told is that Dan had cerebral palsy. So, events that would have been a setback for any of us would prove worse for him.

My memories of Dan mostly precede his accident. I recall a physical person, slender and strong in his body, unwavering in his refusal to be stopped or defined by disability. He expected his friends to see it and not see it at the same time. He expected his friends to keep up when he talked.

Dan played sports. He studied and traveled. He spoke fluent Spanish, spent time in Central America, advocated for disability rights, embraced progressive politics, and ran for city council. He enjoyed hot weather. His skin was warm and his beard was full. He made lasting loves and friendships. He gave us all bear hugs.

When I last saw him (in 2014), these were my memories of him. But the self-reliance guarded so fiercely and for so long had grown harder. Dan flashed an anger I had not seen before.

It was a righteous anger. Not in the biblical sense. It was an anger that said – I am still here despite all that has happened to me.

Coming up: more about cars. More about Northampton, Massachusetts. And something about the history of obituary writing.

My last message to her – still in my archived texts after 13 years – reads: “Shall we try again?” It went unanswered as had my occasional communications from the early 1990s onward. Did she read them? I hope so, even if her failure to reply indicates that I had fallen away from her thoughts.

We met in the late 1970s, both employed by one of the “de-hospitalization” programs active in Massachusetts at the time. Cathy worked in the daycare/workshop side of the organization. I was a live-in support worker at Crescent Street, one of the group homes. (See Postcard #1: Crescent St./Bob Rhodes)

Cathy was married to a commercially successful photographer. She was beginning to pursue her own photographic projects, challenging her husband’s practice along the way. I’d been taking and printing photographs for a few years and had just started studying for a degree in Documentary Photography.

Cathy left the job, after which she and I began a collaboration that lasted a year or so. We photographed, initially, without restraint. There were portraits of the people in our program - staff and residents. The house and the workshop. But outside people and places too. Friends. Western Massachusetts scenes.

We had cars and cameras. We were young. We drove around town. Like boys. Like Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner. “In love with Massachusetts when it’s late at night.” Like Americans, hungry dreamers. Baby boomers growing up, heading for the postmodern turn. Fredric Jameson once said that postmodernism was about “how the world dreams itself to be American.” But surely first/too, Americans had to dream themselves to be American.

We were making ourselves, recording ourselves on film, changing lenses, revving our engines, driving past college buildings and cornfields, naively sure of our ideas. Cathy phoned me most mornings. “Be at the Bagel Deli for nine.” We would down coffee, look at our latest contact sheets and prints, and then set off somewhere chosen by Cathy who knew Massachusetts places far better than I did.

Cathy was older and braver. She was bright, beautiful, fierce in her loves and hates, subversive at work, and increasingly subversive in her private life. Soon she announced that she was leaving her husband and she rejected marriage completely. She took a place on Main Street, one of the old office buildings turned into lofty apartments. It had high ceilings, wrought iron fixtures, and large windows overlooking the pavements, shopfronts, and restaurants.

“There’s a speed limit in this state.” “How fast was I going, officer?” So ran the old movie line. Once out of her marriage, Cathy raced through her changes. Not long after she moved down to Main Street, she told me she was gay. I was not surprised. I realized immediately that it had always been there, and we rejoiced together. Moreover, Northampton was the place to come out. You could not be a woman in Northampton without pausing to think about your sexuality.

Yet looking back, I see how intensely Cathy’s rapid-fire acts and decisions moved alongside and inside our photography collaborations. Each change in her life was announced with a vehemence that felt, at times, like a slight provocation, a criticism that I was not keeping up. We grew irritable when together. We competed with one another. Differences became more apparent. Sometimes a discussion – usually about the merits of one of our photographs – erupted into a heated, if coded argument. We appeared to be disagreeing about one thing, a photograph, when really, we were like angry lovers hiding real arguments behind trumped-up ones. Behind each word was a word that went unspoken.

It was not long before Cathy fell in love with Sunny, another local photographer. To say I was happy for her would be true. To say I was jealous, also true. Not only did the affair interrupt our time together, but they were two photographers. Photography had anchored our friendship and made it exclusive, but now the line had snapped.

We saw less of one another. Cathy was working with Sunny, growing in technical confidence, and developing an ambition for commercial success. At the same time, I was retreating from photography as practice. I was reading art history and critical theory – and this had the effect of paralyzing me. I took fewer photographs, spent less time in the darkroom, and more time reading and writing.

Our deteriorating friendship finally came to an end – or at least a very long pause – when we spent a bad-tempered evening in Sheehan’s Café, one of Northampton’s vintage bars. After a few beers and spiked exchanges, I walked out. It was late. Halfway along Main Street on my way home, I heard Cathy’s wooden clogs behind me. She caught up and shoved me hard against one of the plate glass shopfronts, angry that I had exited without saying goodbye. I have no memory of the words between us. I only remember my back hitting the window, her arms on my shoulders as she shouted at me. Despite a train of apologies in the days that followed, I withdrew. I knew she felt terrible, had probably scared herself. But I withdrew.

It was not long before Cathy moved away from Northampton and I did too. She would become one of the first women camera operators hired by a Springfield, Mass. television station, and later worked for ABC News nationally. Beyond that, I knew little of her life. I returned to academia, pursuing History and university teaching.

I saw her one more time – in the early 1980s. We happened to be back in town for a visit and agreed to meet for a drink. We had both recently given up smoking, but we bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and shared it. It was a good evening, slightly tense, but warm between us. Walking home after the drink, there were no footsteps behind me. I remember thinking how much I had missed her. I remember thinking that the friendship was over.

Here is Cathy’s obituary.

Once my friend.

I wish her love, respect, and an old car.

It makes sense from our standpoint of a philosophy of literature and poetry to say that we “write a room,” “read a room,” or “read a house.” Thus, very quickly, at the very first word… the reader who is “reading a room” leaves off reading and starts to think of someplace in his own past. You would like to tell everything about your room. You would like to interest the reader in yourself, whereas you have unlocked a door to daydreaming… the reader has ceased to read your room: he sees his own again. He is already far off… (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space)