You Can't Go Back

Trading For The Stars has been live on Amazon for over a month now, and sales have trickled in. I've sold something like 110 copies thus far. That works out to about $1 per hour for the work I put into it. That will rise slowly with time, but a book's first month is usually its best. That's hardly making a living.

It might have helped a little if I’d mentioned having published it in a blog post – I didn’t forget to notate it in my progress page, but nothing on the main one. If you’re interested, it’s still for sale.

I had meant to write a blog post about finally getting it published, but somehow forgot, and then – because I had intended to do so – felt like I had done so. Ah, well. All corrected now. It’s that memory thing.

Speaking of memories, yesterday I opened up Google Earth – though for what reason I don’t remember. Anyway, on a whim, I looked up my old hometown. Got down to the street level and looked at where I used to live. The house is gone and a Dairy Queen now resides in that spot. I already knew that, but seeing it again caused a pang.

As I mentioned in my first post on the blog, I used to have a paper route. I started following it, as best as I could remember. Some of the houses I could identify as having belonged to my customers, but not many. It has, in my own defence, been over 40 years. Eventually I came to the house where we lived before moving to the location now occupied by the Dairy Queen.

Since leaving, the house has a new neighbour to the north. The field where my brother and I played catch is now occupied by a house. The back, where my mother tried to make a small skating rink in the winters, now has a fence which would cut through it.

They say you can’t go back. I did, twenty years after my family left. I spent an afternoon looking around. But my memories were tied to a town that no longer existed, to people who no longer populated it. I drove by that second house and saw the tree that my mother had planted. It had grown quite nicely. I took a picture and later showed it to her.

Another twenty years has passed since that afternoon. Looking at the house on Google Earth, I see that my mother’s tree has disappeared, and someone planted another one, which has grown quite large.

The woods that we played in are gone, supplanted by new streets and houses – well, newer streets and houses. The roads in that part of town had not yet been paved when we left; now the pavement looks old and worn. The mud there, when it rained heavily was something ferocious. Walking down to that part of my paper route had me picking up about three or four pounds of gumbo mud with every step. Occasionally, I had to lean over, grab my gumboot with my hands and use them to help pull my foot and boot from where the mud held it. If I didn’t aid with my hands, my foot would come out of the boot. Like I said, ferocious.

Seeing the place – even through Google Earth – brought back a lot of memories. But my memories don’t match what I see. It’s not the town I knew. And I wonder if it might not have been better to leave the town I did know intact in my memory.

Coincidentally, I just went to youtube.com to see if I could find and old song. I did, but as often happens, I went on a youtube ride, clicking on other songs or scenes from movies or television shows. Somehow I ended up watching a scene from “Once Upon A Time In The West”. Then, I saw someone had taken scenes from it and very adroitly transposed the present settings into it. On the set of "Once Upon A Time In The West.

The author has done the same with “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. On the set of The Good The Bad and The Ugly.

Watch them at your peril. Seeing what exists there now, and comparing it to what existed then, in the films, left me with the same sort of empty feeling I got revisiting my home town – both in reality twenty years ago, and through the internet twenty hours ago. Re-watching the movies allows the characters to live again; seeing the places and people refresh the memory. But reality shows that many of the buildings are gone or in a state of disrepair, or mightily changed. Reality tells us that most of the people who populated those films are now dead. They only live on in memory – or on film. Seeing reality makes it more difficult to suspend disbelief. Perhaps we shouldn’t go back.

And perhaps that’s one of the reasons I like to read and to write books. You can always go back and pick up the book again and the characters come back to life, exactly as you left them, be it an hour or a decade ago. Colleen, in “Trading For The Stars” will remain bright, young, and personable for as long as copies of the book exist. [She will age in other books – has shown a more mature side in Pelgraff already, but if I, or you, pick up “Trading For The Stars” next year or next decade, she will remain as we remember her. Glencayther will have become neither a ghost town nor a metropolis, and the townspeople, will also remain as we remember them. They will neither grow old nor die – unless, of course, they die in the book.

The one thing that may change is how they speak to us. As we grow older, gain in experience, we look at the same incidents in different ways. When I first saw “To Sir, With Love” as a boy barely into my teens, I identified with the Denham character, a student (who would have been a few years older than I was), and understood his point-of-view. Watching it again, years later, I identified with the teachers, and my opinion of Denham changed quite radically. I had aged, but Denham remained Denham, still a student and now much younger.

And, of course, in my mind, I remain me, unchanging, unchangeable. Yet, from time to time, I wonder who that person in the mirror is.