As True as I Remember

I spent the first eighteen years of my life trying to make sense of the world in a place that was cut off from it. Though I am a product of the eighties, the popular culture of that decade went virtually unnoticed in that impoverished corner of southeast Kansas. I spent much of my youth with my head pressed against a radio speaker trying to hear the words and songs on a station out of Kansas City that faded in and out like the beacon of a lighthouse in a storm. A city that I along with most now regard as a perfectly nice Midwestern town, not particularly special; at the time was a transmission from another planet. I watched movies set in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, and thought, are those places real? And, how would I ever get there? Then, one day, I got there.

Now when I try to describe where I come from, people look at me like the alien I felt I was back then. Sometimes I feel as though I have travelled in a time machine from a land without cable television, where we chained up our dogs outside, burned our trash in big metal cans in the backyard, hid away from monstrous storms, learned to drive on gravel roads and thought Kansas City was exotic. For the first eighteen years of my life I looked out at nothing but bare pasture dotted with cattle and skinny trees. From where I sit now in my Washington, DC apartment where I've lived for several years, I can see the Washington Monument standing over the rooftops of row houses. As David Bryne once asked, "How did I get here?"

From the Nation's Capital I look back on growing up in a town as idyllic as Mayberry, where we played under the streetlights without fear, caught fish and lightening bugs and got drunk under and on the glow of the stars. A place I also watched come apart at the seams when methamphetamine introduced itself - a place with no sustainable economy, no resources, an undercurrent of religious fundamentalism along with failing schools; a dying place where far too many died young. I will try to make sense of it here. Some of it may have faded from memory or become confused with dreams, but I will do my best to tell it as true as I remember.