Elm City Revisited

I have written before about how "Where are you from?" is a difficult question for me to answer. Most of the people I meet these days tend to assume that I'm a native New Yorker, and I usually just let them go ahead and believe it, because that's as good an answer as any, and anyway at this point I've lived in or around the New York area for 26 years, so sure, I'm from New York.

Except that, technically, I grew up in Connecticut. But not that Connecticut. Not the Connecticut people imagine when you say the word Connecticut. Not Thurston-Howell-III-Greenwich-it-was-just-ghastly-Connecticut. I grew up in New Haven, which is something entirely different.

This weekend Steven and I spent a night away from Milo, and we chose to do it in a remote part of Connecticut that I'd never traveled to before, primarily because it was the only place we could find that hadn't already been booked up by weekend-getaway-crazed New Yorkers. But to get there you go through New Haven. As we were driving up I95 Steven pointed at the window at a decrepit factory building lurking behind a mountain-like pile of rusted crap and said, "What's that? A garbage factory?"

"That," I said, "is New Haven."

People say that New Haven is having a renaissance of some sort, which one would hope would be the case because there wasn't much farther down the New Haven of my childhood could have sunk. In the New Haven of my childhood people were routinely getting shot at the mall. One year the visiting parents of a Yale student got shot and everyone at my high school was like, "What were they doing at the mall? Nobody goes to the mall."

My parents left New Haven immediately after I graduated from high school, so I never got to experience the place as an adult, and as such I have a weird conception of both New Haven and Connecticut. I remember places and how to get to them as a child might remember them, because for most of my life I was driven places. So I know that to get to New York you go over the metal bridge that makes the car vibrate. To get to other places you go through the wonderfully dark tunnel that cuts through the mountain. To get home you need to go around the really sharp curve that throws you to the side of the stationwagon.

Now, as an adult weekender, places that I knew only as dots in a murky sea are finally connected in my mind. So that's where Old Saybrook is. Who knew?

As a child I would sometimes ask to be driven to a friend's house only to be told that it was too far away. "Wallingford?" one or both parents would say. Except that I grew up in a house of extremes, so it would have been said "WALL -(are you out of your MIND) ing-ford? You want to go to WALLingford?"

"There's East Rock," I said to Steven, pointing out the window at a chunk of red granite that dominates the New Haven skyline.

"What's East Rock?" asked Steven.

"It's like ... a park?" I said. "A place you hike? I don't know. It's covered in poison ivy. That's what I know."

Being with me in Connecticut is a little bit like being on a tour guided by a seven-year-old.

"There's also West Rock," I said. "And Sleeping Giant. Somewhere."

Then later.

"There's Guilford. They have apples. There's Hammonasset Beach. They have jelly fish. There's West Haven. They have wastoids."

"What's that mean?" Steven asked.

"In 1986 it meant they had people who drove Camaros and feathered their hair." I pondered this for a minute. "I actually have no idea. It could be very nice for all I know."

We drove past the movie theater. I restrained myself from pointing it out. ("There's the movie theater. My brother spilled a whole tub of popcorn there once.") I checked out the movies listed on the marquee. I half expected Back to the Future to be showing.

New Haven is the same and it's not. Which I guess is why they say you can't go home again. I don't know anyone there anymore. There's a big Ikea downtown, and farther out there's a Bed Beth and Beyond, and a Linens and Things and an Old Navy. People don't get shot at the mall anymore. Actually, they stopped getting shot at the mall sometime around my senior year, when a food court opened and suddenly it became cool to hang out at the food court.

We didn't stop in New Haven on our way to the remote little corner of Connecticut. Why would we? We were just New Yorkers on our way to a weekend getaway.