Learning To Spell

Round on both ends and hi in the middle: OHIO!

I think I was born in my grandmother’s back yard, naked, and lying on a blanket, in Columbus. All the pictures show it, with Concord grapes twining over the back porch, the pie cherry tree crimson, heckled by blue jays, and four o’clocks, sweet Williams, and snapdragons against the fence.

Years later, in San Francisco, the managing editor of the publishing house I worked for, who had run away from Ohio when he was 13, said to me, “The great advantage of growing up in Ohio is that you know exactly what you must rebel against. Think how confused you’d be if you’d been born in California, where anything goes.”

I remember gentle, rolling, dairy-farm hills and no horizon to dream beyond. A one-building school for all twelve grades, where at night from the top floor you could see the lights of Columbus, 16 miles away: a suggestion of horizon.

The sky was black with stars and I learned their names through my father’s telescope. Sunday, we took long rides--up and down city streets looking for ideas for a house my family never built or faded barns that might be transformed into a home. In the fall, we drove to the state parks of southern Ohio, with cliffs and waterfalls like footnotes once I saw the mountains of the West and Utah’s red rock cliffs.

Ohio welcomed putting one foot in front of the other for a lifetime, nuclear families that never exploded into the wider world. We fell in small creeks in the winter when the ice didn’t hold, past snow drifted six feet high along roadside snow fences where the snow still blew over the slippery road. We celebrated summer strawberries and pumpkins in the fall with annual festivals in the town park. We had only one sport—basketball—that once, during my school years, took us to the state championships to win.

Then came the journey West and the California world at full speed: the opera and the coastal redwoods, seabirds and art museums. Season tickets to the Repertory players and the ethnic meals of a hundred geographies. Rock bands in the Haight Ashbury. Protests against the war. The common grief of AIDS.

In later years, I left the city, looking for Ohio, the safe and stable home of my childhood, in a small town in the north state, where I found vineyards, not dairy farms, and redwoods, not white sycamores along a slow creek. I found again the simple cadence of learning to know a landscape, a small town’s ways, the gathering of friendships without any hurry. In California, I came home again to all I’d run away from.