Friday, April 10, 2020 at 11:46 AM
Hopalong Cassidy Trail
Streator, Illinois
The Village of Fenton has made me aware of the passage of time. Thus, I have attempted to make time pause in Fenton. I succeeded a number of times in my experiment.
My parents liked to shop at VG’s market, which once occupied a location near the middle school. Today, Google Maps shows me a field, seeded to grass, where the store and its parking lot stood in the decade called the Seventies. VG’s has moved to Leroy Street, north of town and to the mall out by US-23. VG’s purchased groceries to sell from Spartan Stores, and Spartan Stores liked the VG’s supermarkets enough to buy out the owners, the Van Gilder family, in 2008.
Surely, a new shopping plaza has been envisioned for that parcel of land on the Shiawassee River. But I miss the old VG location. I remember a day soon after our move to Byron, out on the west end of Silver Lake Road. Mom and dad didn’t want to shop hungry, so we sat in the dining room and enjoyed lunch together. Mom gave her children soup and a sandwich, and we were so happy to be all together, dad too. We were exploring our new world and the inflation and unemployment of the middle seventies had yet to bring worry into our lives.
Our washer and dryer went on the fritz a few times, and my father stepped up to repair it. But he needed a new part and it had to be ordered. A laundromat stayed open early to late hours at the corner of Adelaide and Shiawassee Street. My memory tells me that the washers and dryers were painted a shade of olive green. That corner looked over older houses built in the days of horses and carriages, so standing on that corner made for a pleasant time as we did our wash. A man bought the laundromat years later and made the space into a restaurant called the French Laundry. I doubt the current clientele remember that it was really a laundromat.
I taught at the high school as a student teacher sponsored by Michigan State University in 1988. We were reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and my critic teacher Suzanne F. Campbell asked me to visit the Iron Grate at Shiawassee and Leroy and meet the owners, the Dickens family. Thus, I found myself in a village founded in 1834 talking to kin of Charles Dickens, who published Great Expectations in 1861.
Elizabeth Dickens, wife of Graham Dickens, gave me a book to share with my students. She talked to me about her husband, but would not talk to journalists. Once a journalist proposed that her husband read A Christmas Carol aloud on television. The family politely declined. I find myself trying to remember bringing back the book to the store when my teaching assignment was completed. I have a memory of dropping it off at the counter, but I could have made that up.
I’m glad the store has stayed open for decades. I can teleport to the fall of my twenty-fourth year by walking in the door. The stay-at-home order might consider a store stocking the best home furnishings from London to be less than essential, vital but less than essential. Otherwise, I would call to confirm that the business remained open. I noticed Elizabeth's two daughters in the space during my last visit, waiting on customers, relaxed after polishing every glass and ceramic item to sparkling.
I remember a day when my daughter still wanted to be pushed on a swing. We had our walk around Fenton planned after many visits. We would visit a bookstore on Shiawassee Street, once a Little Professor Bookstore and then a private independent called Fenton’s Open Book. Then, we would tuck into French Laundry for lunch. I would always order the Coq au Vin and two bottles of Orangina. Then, we would proceed to the park where a concrete dam stood holding back the mill pond. A playground featured a set of swings. I would promise her to swing her on the swings for a good hour. A clock tower in the distance allowed me to measure my promise, the bells ringing on the quarter hour. The clock helped me keep my promise not to stint on her swinging. I believe that clock and the swinging allowed me to pause time.
This ritual lasted until she was too old to swing on a swing set. We would just stay longer at the bookstore and stroll the park and hear the sound of water rushing over the dam. I have looked to try to identify the clock tower, and I see that the old fire station has a tower. But does that tower ring the quarter hour? I have noticed that the playground has been razed, replaced by the need to add more parking to the fire station, a space that opened as a restaurant. Nevertheless, I am still standing behind my daughter on the swing, giving her big pushes for an hour. I am sure of it.
Fenton High held a homecoming parade, Homecoming 1988, that passed by on Leroy Street. I stood with my students from the high school and we cheered on the band and the floats. Going last, a yellow school bus went by with young children waving out the window. A banner on the bus declared, “The Class of 2000”.
That made me raise my eyebrows as I contemplated the turn of the century approaching in just twelve years. I have to do the math to remind myself that the children on the bus have reached the age of thirty eight. The students I was teaching, freshmen at fourteen years of age, have reached the end of their forties. I’m still standing on the bridge over the Shiawassee River, waving with my students at the children on the bus.
The sign hanging from a pole on Shiawassee Street waited thirty years before I followed it to Oakwood Cemetery, home of a section called Old Prospect Hill. I had noticed it hundreds of times driving with my family as we returned home from visits to our grandparents in Detroit. I parked by the hill, read the historical marker, and walked the trails among the old tombstones.
The Questers had taken care of the cemetery, replinthing the stones, making each stand upright for another hundred years. I took little note of the names but I knew Clark Dibble, founder of Dibbleville, had rested on the hill after buying his land in 1834. I paused for a moment and contemplated the span of seventeen decades. But as a man of four decades, I couldn’t grasp thirteen decades more. I started up the truck, and headed out to see my parents, mom and dad then in their sixties.
By Antoine Claudet - Library Company of Philadelphia
Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36912228
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