Point of View: The Near Midwest
“It’s all the same fuckin’ mall, man,” I said to Mary as we headed west from Pittsburgh last week on Route 80 in search of greener pastures, which we were to find in Perrysburg, Ohio, whose historic district reminds one of Sag Harbor on a river.
There were malls that appall and treeless tract housing there too, though well beyond the village, whose historic district is welcoming, its sidewalks lined by gnarly trees, whose roots have been known to thread through old sewer lines and cause cataclysmic cloacal backups such as happened the last time we were there — just as we had sat down to what was to be a celebratory family feast.
Perrysburg’s spirit is upbeat, as it is here, nature and a sense of place, I think, playing a big hand in it. At an elementary school ceremony they talked of respect, responsiveness, and responsibility, honesty, creativity, and kindness. There was one sour note — no mention of irreverence, but then again I always got Cs in citizenship.
Everybody waves to you there! There’s a palpable feeling of comity, though I hear Democrats must meet in the catacombs.
While our trip to see our daughter, son-in-law, and two young grandsons was, likewise, brief, a few moments in their paternal grandparents’ deck chairs at the edge of the breezy Maumee in the setting sun can stay with you a long time. Indeed, it helped to make bearable an interminable eight hours’ slumping wait in the Baltimore-Washington International Airport for the hop to Islip.
Unresponsive, uncreative, irresponsible, unkind . . . Southwest Airlines would have merited no awards at Toth Elementary that day.
“The good news is we’ve beaten the trade parade, though barely,” I said to Mary as we tooled along Route 27 in the early morning hours toward home.
More good news: In the absence of any other traffic, the beauty of this place was, even in the dark, she said, all the more evident.
A few hours later I was back at work, and happily so, Main Street having been shut down to traffic at 9 a.m. so hordes of middle schoolers with the beach their goal could dash across it.
A moment’s pause before the summer’s frenzy, which at its heights could well find me singing, “Why, oh why, oh why, oh / Why did I ever leave Ohio. . . .”