Orleans, Indiana is a town of 2000 souls and from 1975 to 1985 I was one of those souls, albeit a small one. There were pockets of darkness hidden in neighborhoods that I mostly avoided but sometimes brushed up against for the briefest of moments.
My Dad was a pastor and it was expected I would not hang out with the “bad” kids, but that was OK because I was mostly a loner anyway. I had friends, but none that wouldn’t turn on me in a heartbeat if expedient to do so. Maybe it was something about me?
I spent much of my time roaming the streets of this town on my bike. There were no helmets, no cell phones, and no sense that something could go terribly wrong. And if it did, it passed me over and found some other kid or family to haunt for years to come.
There was the town square with the drug store and its comic book rack, the movie theater showing “First Blood”, a ceramics store where my Mom painted things to decorate our house, and the variety store with three levels of secondhand treasures.
There was the high school with its palatial basketball gym but primitive cinder track, the elementary school with Patton Field for Little League games, and the nearby airstrip with ultralights waiting to take to the sky like giant mechanical dragonflies.
There was melancholy by the rick load though I didn’t really know what that was back then. It was the air I breathed and a persistent heaviness in my chest. It drew me at times to the massive cemetery to brood, the quietest of quiet places.
And it is the town that most thoroughly put its stamp on me, a decade of growth and development from 1st to 10th grade in the heart of Southern Indiana. I love it in the way someone would love a good-enough parent because that’s who raised you.
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2 comments:
“2000 Souls” is a reminiscence written in the depths of that first year of the pandemic about my childhood spent in a small town in Southern Indiana. Reading it now even just four years later I’ve picked up on some interesting nuances.
For example, I realize now why I have been mostly immune to the whole “Make American Great Again” phenomenon. As a curious and sensitive kid I felt the cultural vibrations of America in the 70’s in my bones as a dreadful dissonance. I wasn’t a woman or a minority, yet I could sense something was profoundly wrong with the world around me.
To deal with that I became steeped in denial as a way to try and avoid what was most unpleasant about growing up here. It was during the 80’s when I learned how to ignore those things that revealed my complicity with evil in and around me, showed my lack of integrity, or frustrated my position of entitlement.
And then in the 90’s some major life changes and circumstances opened my eyes to the person I was becoming and I started to regain some of that sensitivity and perceptiveness of my childhood. I learned to battle those insecurities that wanted to keep me hoodwinked and justifying the unjustifiable.
So, I was one of those “2000 Souls” in a fishbowl with colorful rocks, a mysterious castle, and a treasure chest that provided some distraction and enjoyment to a little boy, but the water I swam in was brackish and polluted, and I knew it.
You painted such a clear picture, thank you!
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