The Village

Driving through the village that I claim as my hometown, you'd never guess that it was once big enough to need one hotel, much less two. It had at least two hotels in the past, though, as well as several churches. There were factories, and bakeries, and it was more than just a few streets and a huge number of horrible people. Most of it's gone now, since most of it burned down, but there are still traces.

One of the bakery buildings still exists over behind where the old post office was (before it burned down):



although it's not a bakery anymore. The churches are still there, and we still have a Depot Street with train tracks, even though the trains mostly go through without stopping.

Driving through, you'd probably be struck by how green and pretty everything seems to be, with the streams:







and the tourist footbridge:



(Seriously, why did they even build that? It doesn't connect anything important to anything else important, and the seating section in the middle just faces a different bridge that cars drive over:



Who is this fancy bridge even designed for?)

and the water tower:



and the horses and buggies:





and the replica Statue of Liberty:



which, other than my family and friends, is the only thing I love in Philly now that they got rid of the stretch limo up on blocks:



but never forget:

Philly is an awful place populated mostly by awful people.

You see, at the beginning of summer in 1994, I went to the village office:



to apply for a village summer rec job. I was not able to apply, though, because there wasn't an actual application. Instead, I was told that those jobs are only for people who are related to other people, even though they were municipal jobs partially funded by my parents' taxes and the taxes of all the other village residents who lived there but weren't related to the mayor or members of the town board. Home for the summer without a car, I applied for the only job in walking distance that claimed to be hiring, but it wasn't hiring because the village was practicing nepotism and discrimination, the latter of which I watched it dispense freely throughout high school.

I never spent a full summer in my village again.

I always enjoy my visits home, but I always make sure I leave again.

"This is terrible and I hate it."

My staff sometimes claims that I don't handle change well. This is partially true, but also partially a gross generalization. I eventually handle change, but my immediate first response is usually irritation and confusion. As such, I feel slightly guilty for the couple hours that my friend Chris spent with me on Saturday, touring the SUNY Cortland campus and listening to me go, "This isn't right. This isn't right either. I don't like any of this."

I actually did like a lot of it, but I was disoriented by the way the campus is somehow still the same, but also entirely different.

Cortland looms large in my life, and also in my subconscious. On a regular basis, I still have dreams set on campus, and I have a lot of memories there. Until I moved to Albany, and then Knoxville, Cortland was the city that I had lived in for the longest amount of time in my life, and like any place that you live a long time, I have a lot of memories both positive and negative tied up there. I'm assuming the positive outweigh the negative, as I still wanted to visit Cortland and see it again.

Albany, on the other hand, can die in a fire.

After all the people there that I still like have time to get out.

Back to Cortland, our first sign of trouble came when I called Chris to ask where to park:

"Where on campus are you now?"

"At the end of Bishop and whatever weird building is attached to the end of Bishop."

"Oh, God. OK. Go to Corey Union, and there's a little parking lot on the side."

"The little side lot is still there? Next to Van Hoesen?"

"Yes. Park there."

Corey Union still looks mostly the same, except that they redid the front steps:



which you can't see in that picture since I took it from the side lot. Van Hoesen, on the other hand...



That looks nothing like Van Hoesen. The inside still looks the same, until you go upstairs and you find out that Cornish Hall is just a hallway in the new education building. Seriously. The whole building is gone except for one string of offices that are still labeled and numbered as Cornish Hall.

The rest of the tour of campus was very similar. Some things haven't changed at all on the outside:





and some are unrecognizable:





That's Bowers, and the planetarium. I'm not 100% sure, because I was only in it a few times, but I feel like the planetarium isn't even in the same place.

Campus looks good, though. When I came the architecture could be dated to a very specific period, mostly, and it looks like they've moved away from some of that. According to Chris, almost every building I pointed at has been redone on the inside, even if the outside only looked minorly tweaked, except maybe for Moffett:



where, I explained to Chris, "Once I was going in through the side door to go to Brit Lit and the steps were icy and I slipped on them and tore the knee out of my jeans and cut my knee open, too."

I tried to keep most of the stories to that level of reminiscing because Chris brought his son, CJ, with us:



(there they are in front of Sperry; my first year of college there was a girl who lived in my building who said she was part of the family the building was named after, but told us it was "not really a big deal") so it seemed like maybe I should keep the stories a little clean, rather than pointing at Bowers and explaining how many people I knew who had sex in the VAX lab or the lockable ADA-accommodated bathroom on the first floor (Including me, in the bathroom, one time on a dare senior year. I'm not especially proud of this memory, but at the time I was.) or places where people I know vomited or peed.

See? I can be good with kids.

Many of the buildings have only changed a little on the outside, like Dowd:



where I had theatre classes and also spent many evenings senior year sitting and working on student teaching homework and writing in my journal about how much I (thought I) loved Jackass (turns out I was wrong) in the ceramics lab while Jackass worked on his class projects,

Miller:



which was taken over by students during my junior year to protest a lack of diversity programming on campus; an annual "Diversity Day" was held a few weeks later that included suspending classes for the day, and despite being "annual" was never held again,

Lusk:



which my friend Angie got in trouble for climbing (the roof is now metal and unclimbable), or Smith and Casey:



where I have way too many memories to list but on the lawn of which my friend Leslie once tried to explain to me that it's not ok to bring a book to a cookout in case you get bored with the people there. In the ensuing years I have only partially heeded this advice.

Some things are entirely new, like the sculpture of the dying rhino:



which I would have loved as a student; the stadium:



or the brand new recreation facilities:







Also, Whitaker is, randomly enough, the police station now:



The real surprises came when we toured the residence halls, though. Bishop, as I mentioned, has a building attached to it now, Glass Tower Hall. Hayes, the last hall where I was a hall director before leaving, also has a building attached, Dragon Hall:





They also redid the front steps, where are now longer, but less steep.

They also changed my beloved Alger Hall, where I first lived as a student, first worked as a student staff member, and first worked as a hall director. While the call box by the front door looks exactly the same:



the outside looks slightly different:





and the inside looks very different:



The office is in the middle of the lobby now, and where the staff office and my office used to be there's now a two story lounge:



That last window on the left was my office window.

Upstairs, my room looked exactly the same on the inside:



except that it used to be blue. During the renovation, though, all of the doors got renumbered, so the room number isn't the same:



Todd and I did not live in 524, but I know it was the right room based on where the window was on the hallway. My friend Alena's room, at the opposite end of the hall, isn't even there anymore, because that end of the hallway is a big multi-bedroomed suite now.

I'm very thankful to Chris for providing a guided tour, with narration, so that I wasn't just walking around for two hours going, "What the hell is this?" Campus seems like a very exciting place now, and I'm sure the students enjoy all of the new upgrades and all of the memories of their own that they're attached to buildings, trees, sculptures, bus stops, the weird parking lot in the back of the cemetery that wasn't there when I was a student, and wherever it is that they go to all you can eat (rebranded as "All You Care to Eat" sometime during my years as a student, as some students took the first name as a challenge) brunch on the weekend now that Winchell is no longer a dining hall. It kind of makes me want to start sending Cortland some money.

But only Cortland.

Albany can fend for itself.

Books 27-30: Number 31 is taking weeks

Right before I left on my trips I read a couple of short books, because I was saving two long books for the trips and figured I would just write up all of the books together when I got back. I haven't done that, though, because the second long book is killing me. It's interesting, but so long that I started it in Providence, kept reading when I got home, read it in Greenville, and am still reading it now.

My goal is to finish it before I leave for New York later this month.

In the meantime, here are the other books I read before I fell into the longest biography ever:

27) From late 2004 to early 2012, I played an online game called City of Heroes, where I made many friends online and some of them became friends offline. One of them was my friend Lisa, who I continue to interact with in a different game, Champions Online. Recently, Lisa asked if she could use one of my game characters in a novel she was writing about one of her game characters, and Grimaulkin is the result. It tells the story of Mike LeBonte, who just got out of five years in magic prison for summoning demons to eat bullies when he was a teenager. Now that he's out, he has to find a way to rebuild his life, but he's forbidden from using any of the summoning spells that grant him the most power.

He's also extremely attracted to a young magic shop owner with fantastic abs who works down the street from his sister's apartment. Guess whose character that is?

This was a fun book. Mike starts working with a seedy private investigator whose helping the police with a series of murders, while also trying to reconnect with his family and explain what happened to him and why he vanished. It's a fast read, and also the book is dedicated to me, so you should buy it because it's also entertaining and it looks like there may be a sequel coming.

28) Robert R. McCammon's Last Train From Perdition returns us to the world of his late 1800's vampire bounty hunter, Trevor Lawson, last seen in I Travel By Night. Trevor and his human ally, Ann, are still on the hunt for LaRouge, the vampire who turned Trevor and took Ann's sister and father, but are also taking jobs in between to cover the bills. One job, tracking down a wealthy businessman's wayward son in the far west town of Perdition finds them surrounded by enemies human and vampire, struggling to save a train full of people from certain death even as the dark forces within him threaten to overwhelm the last of Trevor's humanity.

This was also a good read. The story moves quickly, but there are some good character moments and some interesting scenes. Both books in the series are on the short side, more novellas than novels, but I'm looking forward to a third.

29) Carol Goodman has a niche: she likes to write books about the Hudson River Valley, and almost every book involves a secret illegitimate baby. It's come to the point that as soon as I start reading them, I immediately start trying to figure out who the secret baby is and how the plot will hinge on them, but I keep reading her books anyway because they are well written, entertaining mysteries.

With secret babies.

In The Widow's House, Clare and her husband, Jesse, move from Brooklyn to their former college town, becoming caretakers for their former writing professor and his estate. Staying on the grounds, Jesse is planning to work on his novel, and Clare starts writing again as she begins to see visions of a legendary village girl, the Apple Maiden, who died tragically on the grounds of the estate, after losing her secret baby in a terrible blizzard. Is the estate haunted? Is Clare having a breakdown? And is Clare, who is adopted, someone's secret baby?

This, like all of Goodman's books, was a nice, entertaining vacation read.

30) I knew I wanted to read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America as soon as I saw it at the bookstore, and I was saving it for a trip, since I knew I would have hours to sink into it then. I'm glad I did, because this was a long, complicated book. Although it's full of facts, it's written at a pretty easy level to sink into, and it will definitely make you think.

It apparently also made other people think, because everyone who saw the title of the book in my hand wanted to know what it was about, if it was good, and if I liked it. I did, even if I did disagree that the Civil War was based as much in class as it was in race. Class may have played a part, but the Civil War was primarily about racism.

That said, it's time to get back to my extremely long, extremely detailed biography of my pretend literary boyfriend, F. Scott Fitzgerald.