Things have got to get better, I hope
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- January 13, 2024
- 864
An open letter to my hometown:
What? You think it’s funny to welcome me back with snow and ice and temperatures in the teens? Three days and two power outages?
Do you have any idea what I gave up to return to you? I must have been out of my mind to consent to this kind of sadistic arrangement.
Nothing about you is remotely reassuring, unless you count the disconcerting law-enforcement presence as embodied by city badges, county deputies and state highway patrolmen, all of whom seem to be engaged in a twisted game of “Can You Cop This?”
My little town is now part of the police state … how effing lovely.
I guess it’s true what I’ve heard for years: Ohio is now Alabama, just without all those college football national championships.
And what about your all-black cop cars? I remember when they had cheery white chassis with blue piping and positive slogans printed on them, stuff like “To Serve and Protect.” These days they look like storm-trooper ATVs, with blackened windows, the kind of aggressive vehicles Stephen King wrote in “The Stand.”
So no, I haven’t enjoyed any part of my homecoming, not a bit of it. This rental house has doors to which there are no keys, meaning I could very easily lock myself out with no way back in.
The garage door “opener” doesn’t work from the outside, which defeats the whole purpose of having one. You have to stop the car, get out in the snow and the dark, unlock the side door, reach in and press a button, then trundle back to the car in the howling wind before pulling in and putting the car in park … and the landlord shrugs, “Well, I just found that opener in a drawer somewhere,” meaning it might not even be synced with the mechanism.
The whole misadventure got off to the most ominous sort of start when, after seven hours of packing our belongings, the mover was unable to find space for one item. Guess what it was. I dare you.
If you had “snow shovel” on your Dewey bingo card, well played.
I could write a novella on that metaphor if I weren’t too exhausted to think; I mean it’s taking me an immense amount of energy to simply type out these few random paragraphs as I work in this frigid basement, knowing spring is a hundred long days away.
And that’s the thing. I knew all about Ohio winters. I grew up in them. I had a semi-serious social life in them. I worked in them, driving all over hell’s half-acre looking for high school gyms in the middle of “In Cold Blood” country to witness basketball blowouts and then drive back to the office, not understanding this was to be my life for as long as the bosses put up with my bad attitude.
Because I had talent, you see, not a lot of it, but enough to stay safe.
That’s what I left behind when I set out for North Carolina at the turn of the century, and sure enough, just as soon as I’d established myself in a new town in a new state in a new part of the country, the economy collapsed and the recession swallowed my job whole.
For two years I collected unemployment benefits — a couple hundred a week, if I followed the rules — and then I found a part-time gig as a security officer, the guy with the clipboard who either granted or denied folks entry into a gated community, where my wife and I lived, adding yet another layer of irony to my tale.
And that was my life until it became obvious the house we were renting was about to be put on the open market in spring 2024, meaning we had a clear choice — get hit or hit back first.
And that, my little town, is how I came running back to you.
Pardon me for saying so, but it looks as if I miscalculated a little.
Nothing about this place has been the least bit inviting, let alone welcoming. It’s a cold, distant dot on the map, a chilly backwater filled with loud pickup trucks, fat kids sporting camo pants in the overcrowded Walmart and, as I may have mentioned, lots of cops.
January is built for letdowns and disappointment. Faithful readers may recall I lost both of my parents in this hellhole of a month, 18 years apart, but still, you can easily understand why I despise it.
The holidays are gone, stray strands of tinsel sucked up into the vacuum’s maw, pine needles clinging to the carpet nap like Jack on the raft just before Rose shoves him off to his icy, watery grave.
People talk about “Titanic” like it was a great romantic love story when, in point of actual fact, it’s all about a spoiled rich girl, with slatternly wiles, who lures in a nice guy only to kill him in the end.
That actually happened to me many Januaries ago: well, not so much the bit about being drowned by a psychotic heiress, but I was part of a girl’s winter purge, the kind women orchestrate with the slick dexterity of a chess vixen, knight errant into queen’s web.
To lift an apt lyric from Nick Lowe, you gotta be cruel to be kind.
So I can’t blame you, my hometown, for being the way you are. I knew all about you when I left and understand you now that I’m back. All I’m asking is a beneficent respite from all the nastiness.
Besides, I’m locked into a two-year lease on this house, and I’d really like to think of it as a blessing and not a prison sentence.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com.