18 Years in Savannah, GA
Found myself thinking about the place where I was born and raised. I lived there for 18 years. I haven't been back in almost that long.
Sometimes I think about going there with Charles. Showing him where I met Victor. The exact spot where Victor and John first kissed in front of me and I'd realize that a pretty boy is a joy forever. The houses, playgrounds, schools, libraries, parks that colored my early days.
I scoured Google trying to find images of Savannah. Particularly I wanted to get a photo of the Colonial cemetery. I grew up across the street from it. A playground was on the other side. So I walked past graves almost everyday. The city jail bounded another side of the playground and I could watch the prisoners as I swung.
Being the founding city of a colony Savannah has lots of houses. Not many from the 18th century but the downtown area is filled with pastel Victorians. It was disconcerting to see slum dwellings with stained glass. Gentrification must've pushed those folks into houses projects by now. I did manage to find the photo of the house above. The picture doesn't do it justice. I always wished I could buy it. It is a zany clash of turrets, cupolas and whatnot.
For me Savannah's chief glory was the twenty-odd squares dotted across the intersections downtown. Huge stone seats and benches. Statues of 18th century notables like John Wesley.
Savannah has changed much. It changed quite a bit in the few years before I left. They built a mall, changing the downtown into a mostly African-American shopping district. McDonald's came to town with all the other fast food chains to follow. All the mom and pop chicken places and small chains faded. When I was little there were still candy shops and soda-fountains run by first and second generation immigrants. Many of them had imposing long and consonant-heavy Greek names.
Savannah was a safe space of toleration in Georgia. Most big high school dances were held at a Jewish center. In the old black section of downtown you could find shops selling aerosol cans of hex repellant and sex appeal. I bought a bottle promising "POWER!"
Except for an odd little museum, a public library branch and a few offices Savannah's riverfront was deserted when I was a kid. By the time I left Chamber of Commerce boosterism had filled it with cute 'shoppes,' sporting names like Untiques.
A few old buildings were torn down and replaced with sand colored tissue boxes. TV had begun the pureeing of the American mind: quirks were being straightened, economies of scale overpowering the inefficient and homely. Savannah was never as urban or as genteel as some of its citizens believed. But it did have its own commingling of idiosyncrasies and as much as I hated living there and was hungry to leave I hated seeing it become more and more like Anywhere, USA.
Savannah got in on the local Art School Racket. From what I hear it has done well. Lots of earnest young aesthetes have flocked there to be the next Hockney or O'Keefe. Talent and a degree from Pratt don't guarantee a footnote in The Oxford Encyclopedia of 21st Century Artists or commercial success. Some of these bright young things won't have much determination as will drift off into permanent Greenwich Village boho life. Others accepting their fate will go on to do paste-up for a community shopper or design web pages for Sprockets-R-Us. And somebody's genius and luck will get them regular write-ups in Art Forum.
The Savannah College of Art and Design has probably caused my home town to teem with coffee and pastry shops. Admittedly an improvement over Oglethorpe Mall's Der Weinerschitzel I can't help smiling at the faux elitism fostered by coterie coffee shops.
I'm going to fight my discursiveness. I get impatient with many of the images of loner and outsider status. Too many pampered children sit around and pat themselves on the back for their unusual taste and sensitivity. In a world of more than five billion people it is hard to say if anybody is really unique. More dishearteningly there are folks who become enamored of loneliness, fondling it like a lover. I don't see much point (not the best way to phrase it) to being a loner if it doesn't imbue your life with zest. But I'll save all this for another time.
The willful quaintness of the 18,793 places like this stretching from San Diego to Brattleboro is homogenization. It makes Savannah yet even more like everywhere else.
Dampening the sarcasm, Savannah needs the money. At the time I left about 1,000 other people did likewise every year. By the early 23rd century nobody would be living there.
Besides given the choice between going to art school and, say, working for McDonald's or Uninteresting, Overbearing & Boorish: Attorneys-at-Law I'd grab me some scissors, magazines and start making collages.