Compulsively Aimless

    In 1988, I drove across country as a last burst of freedom before starting my first full time adult job. My goal for the trip was to find a lost family house that belonged to my great grandparents in Pasadena, California. Lost and abandoned became one of the themes of the trip. Some things lost because decisions were made to destroy them and others simply abandoned. 1. Lost America: From the Mississippi to the Pacific, Constance M. Grieff (1974).  During my cross country drive, I stopped in Albuquerque, NM to look for its train station and the Alvarado Hotel. It was one of the country's greatest railroad stations along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe route from Chicago to Los Angeles.  Built in a "Pueblo" style style, it included landscaped courtyards and shopping arcades. True to the words of Joni Mitchell's song, it was demolished and paved over for a parking lot. I read this much later in Grieff's book. Inherited from my mother.   2. Lost America: From...

                                                     Gale Stockwell, Parkville, Main Street, 1933, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum Historically...small-town America has been an underground reservoir of values for the larger nation, sending out its foods, its ambitious youths, its family values and its fad-free common sense attitude to the larger nation.  The underlying and ominous warning is that the inevitable reservoir of values, like the aquifers beneath many of the cities, is being rapidly fouled and sucked dry by a larger society that may soon find, to its uncomprehending surprise and distaste, nothing of value coming up from the straw.          ---Ron Powers, 1991 I'm a sucker for books and poems about small town life. I grew up in and around a medium and small town in nor...