Memoirs, Ink

The Strange Familiar

by David Giffels

In my city there is a tree or not really a tree so much as the dismembered corpse of a tree: five remaining feet of trunk and the stubs of truncated limbs. It stands about 10 feet tall, arching hither and yon in the shape of a Seussian “Y.” It appears to have been lopped down to this state a very long time ago. The wood is close to petrified, the bark is long gone and the bald, gnarled trunk is pocked with tiny insect holes. This is a very public tree, in a place where you really shouldn’t expect to find a tree, right downtown in a concrete landscape, poking up from a narrow, crabby strip of grass between two parking lots that exit to a busy thoroughfare. It’s hard to say when I first noticed it, but it’s not hard to say why. The tree stands in front of the county morgue.

I used to like to think that in some cosmic way, the tree was placed there specifically for my benefit, a reward for the years of careful attention I’ve paid to the symbolic landscape of my hometown. Some might say that my subject -- Akron, Ohio -- renders this a thankless job. But when you grow up in a place like this, a manufacturing town hard-bitten by the loss of industry, you understand intrinsically the value of the Thankless Job. (People here used to say, with great cheer, that the dense factory-produced stench of burning rubber was “the smell of success.” That sort of thinking doesn’t get outbred easily.) So I watch for and collect details of my place the same way I hoard notes and drawings from my children, as a hedge against the possibility of forgetting who they were in a moment to which neither of us can ever return.

In Akron, in, say, 1950, there was something known as a “Goodyear Man.” I love the idea of the Goodyear Man. This is someone who would wake up in the morning in his house in Goodyear Heights, put on a pair of shoes with Goodyear welt soles, climb into a car with Goodyear tires and drive down Goodyear Boulevard, past Goodyear Junior High and Goodyear Metropolitan Park, with (on a good day) the Goodyear blimp hovering overhead, to his job at the Goodyear factory.

And that was just on the east side. South Akron had a parallel population of Firestone Men, the city’s ranks filled out by Goodrich and General Men, all with their own versions of the same nominal routine, all breathing the same smell of success.

I think everyone who has a strong connection to place experiences this instinct to collect and arrange detail. Instead of the place becoming mundane and stale, it becomes weirder and richer, in much the same way that a common word repeated over and over begins to sound like something ticklish and exotic. (Stomach, stomach, stomach, stomach, stomach, stomach, stomach …) There’s a rock band from Akron called the Strange Familiar and that name exactly describes this sensation of observing your surroundings for a lifetime until they take on the quality of theater. The Strange Familiar. When you live in a mundane place, it’s a good survival technique. Make yourself a tourist and pretend you’re here with a purpose.

So to discover the limbless remains of a tree at the entrance to the county morgue is like finding accidental public sculpture. In my city, the courthouse lions have nothing on the mortuary’s Tree of Death.

I’ve been carrying this anecdote around like a little show poodle in the kennel of my brain, a pleasant companion to the mutts and strays. The past several months, I’ve taken to telling the story of the tree and musing about its implications. It has become a staple of my material. I’ve told the tree story at parties and in barroom conversations. I‘ve dropped it in as one of those pretend-spontaneous asides in e-mail correspondence. I even once repeated it during an interview with a reporter from a Very Large and Well Known Newspaper, an attempt at parochial charm.

Who, I ask rhetorically in my rehearsed retellings, takes the trouble to cut a tree down that far, then just abandons it without bothering to make that last cut at the base? Or was it done on purpose this way, a deliberate act of symbolism? And why was a tree planted there in the first place, in a decidedly unnatural section of town? Was the tree cut down because it had died, or did the cutting cause its death? Did the woodsman himself die in the act of felling the tree, his body carried the few feet through the front doors and into the waiting arms of the medical examiner, the unfinished work left as a bitter legacy, the official cause of death standing there in full relief across the parking lot ? And, finally: Does anyone think about this stuff besides me?

The other day, out on an errand, I decided to go have a closer look at the tree. I followed the old familiar route: past the jazz-age nightclub-turned-gay bar, past the spot where Sojourner Truth once spoke: “Ain’t I a woman?” I drove up the busy thoroughfare and it came into view, squeezed between the parking lots, my deeply symbolic tree.

In … the … wrong place.

It wasn’t in front of the coroner’s office. It was a full block away.

At first, I wondered if the tree had been moved. Although I admit this might be unlikely, it seemed the only possible explanation. But no, it was here, right at the intersection where it always has been. And there, a full 500 feet away, was the medical examiner’s office. At the next intersection, where it always has been. Somehow, my mind had compressed two nearly true ideas into one semi-transcendent idea, one that I really wanted to believe.

Our brains want stories so badly that sometimes, apparently, they do their own manufacturing.

Everyone knows memory is fallible, but it seems like maybe that’s not so much a matter of inefficiency as desire. We try to see things the way they are, yet we more often remember them the way we want them to be.

So I’m still telling the story of my tree, now not because it is true, but because I wanted it to be true, which is itself a kind of truth.

 

David Giffels is the author, most recently, of All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House, a highly acclaimed memoir about his coming of age as young father trying to reclaim a nearly condemned mansion, published in 2008 by William Morrow/HarperCollins. He is co-author of two other books: the rock biography Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! and Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron. His essays have appeared in The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia; The Appalachians: America’s First and Last Frontier;  and in the New York Times Magazine, Redbook, This Old House Magazine and many other publications. A longtime columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal, he now teaches creative writing at the University of Akron. He is currently writing a book about growing up in the Rust Belt.