This appeared on Ricochet and it was so beautiful and touching and moving that I asked the author for his permission to publish it here. He gracously gave his permission to do so and here it is. It is clearly among the most poignant short essays I have ever read about not only Mothers but about the places in our lives and our search to experience once again those places and emotions and feelings. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Happy Mother’s Day!
What Used To Be Here
Bartholomew Xerxes Ogilvie, Jr.
May 12, 2024 (1 Hour Ago)
I made good time. According to the clock on the dashboard, it’s only three hours since I left home. And that’s including the time I took stopping at McDonald’s for a breakfast biscuit, and the slow traffic in Charlotte that seemed to have no discernible cause.
And yet the drive has taken me the distance of an entire lifetime. I turn the corner onto the street where I grew up, and everything looks exactly the same as it has looked for the last fifty years. Nothing ever changes here. But for the first time ever, I have a feeling I’ve never had before: I don’t really recognize this place anymore. How can that be, when it hasn’t changed?
Mom greets me as usual. She’s approaching ninety, and I suppose she probably looks it, but I don’t see that; I just see Mom, the same as ever. But she’s having trouble remembering things. She doesn’t seem to know how to use the computer anymore, and she doesn’t understand the document she received in the mail from one of her financial institutions. I still see the same Mom as ever, the woman who earned a master’s degree while raising me, the woman I used to talk to about history and used to come to for advice. She needs my advice now.
I take her out for an early Mother’s Day dinner. As we drive across town, I scan the buildings we pass, and I realize that I’m not actually seeing any of them. I’m seeing what used to be there. Ah, yes, that’s where the Community Cash store was. That’s where the Pizza Hut was, the one where my girlfriend and I used to go sometimes. I navigate this town by landmarks, but none of them are actually there anymore.
Back in the neighborhood again, it looks as familiar as it ever did. And I realize that I’m doing the same thing. That’s where my friend Will used to live. That’s the house where we used to always see Mrs. Greeley’s four chihuahuas out in the driveway. That’s the ditch where my friends and I used to play in the culvert.
But if I look closer, do the houses maybe seem a bit more run-down? Is the pavement a little bit more broken, a bit more in need of repair?
Or is it just me that’s different? I now live a life that’s in another time and place. I live three hours away from here, and fifty years away from here. When I visit, I’m visiting a museum of my past. I treasure the memories and what they mean to me, but the place itself … it isn’t really here anymore. None of it is. I just come here to remind myself of what used to be here.
I went to my old neighborhood after serving several years in the military. It was a ghetto neighborhood. I was shocked to find the hood had been razed to make room for condos and single family homes. It's the same neighborhood that years later, the "affluent " youths spit at the police, threw water at them. Lawlessness. So much for the upper middle class. Welcome to the new improve Brownsville, Brooklyn.