I Grew Up in a Small Town...

I am sitting in a Bruegger's Bagels near the center of Amherst, taking advantage of a couple of hours of free time to drink a cup of coffee, read my email, and think about my home town.

There was no Bruegger's when I was growing up here, and it was Hi-Fi, not Wi-Fi that was the cool new technology. Other changes in town are more subtle but more profound: the passing out of existence of businesses that used to be pillars of the place; the aging and passing of members of my parents' generation; the aging of loss of independence for my own parents. Coming back here, I find myself consulting with some of my boyhood companions, who stayed in the area and are now elders of the community, the lawyers, property managers, businessmen who sit on the board of the little league and watch their own children graduate from high school and leave for college.

Sometimes it seems like the only thing that hasn't changed is the basic geography of the place, the landscape that I came to know intimately, first through the normal explorations of a kid just kicking around town with his friends, and later through the experience of a thousand runs that took me in ever-wider circles: Amherst, Hadley, Sunderland, Leverett, Shutesbury, even Greenfield.

I smile when I think that I know exactly how far it is (to the tenth of a mile) from my parents' house to North Amherst Center, taking the back roads through Hadley, past the riding stable and the tobacco barns, a long empty stretch that seems to last forever on a hot summer day, and punishes you in January with a steady headwind. I know the trails behind Amherst College, and I remember where you can go off the trails, and, if you are bold and daring and don't mind stepping gingerly over a barbed wire fence, you can cut through the fields to emerge on Mill Street.

I don't run here often. When I do, every step brings back memories. I think about the ten-mile loop I used to traverse through Hadley, taking South Maple Street all the way to Bay Road, which felt like the end of the known world to me. I remember the smell of manure from the cattle farms, and the barking dogs that weren't always tied up. I remember the run that started with me heading West up and over Mt. Warner Road, then running North on Rt. 47 all the way to Sunderland Center and back into town via Rt. 116, the longest run I had ever done at the time.

I remember running to Shutesbury to see my girlfriend - nine miles, and yes, it was mostly uphill -- and the disapproving look on her mother's face when I showed up, a skinny tramp in sneakers needing a ride back into town. I remember the loops from the high school with the team, out North East Street to Cushman and Flat Hills Road, up Pelham Hill, Harkness Road.

I sometimes think that I have a deficiency for recalling normal things -- the classrooms, movie theaters, pizza places that ought to fill me with nostalgia, but, in truth, leave me relatively unmoved. Instead, some undistinguished stretch of road inspires me to recall endless summers and youthful adventures.

The funny thing is, the classrooms have all been torn down and replaced in new school buildings; the pizza places have come and gone, in rapid succession. I don't even know where people go to see movies anymore. But the roads of Amherst are still here, their friendly shoulders hardly changed from the 60s and 70s. It occurs to me that these are the places, and just about the only places, where for a time I can imagine that nothing has changed for me, either.