Bringing a piece of home to home

Ken Lund https://flickr.com/photos/75683070@N00/7992968569

The experience of staying in one place most of your childhood is irreplaceable. Stasis allows depth. 

This is what I had in Akron from age four to nineteen. It was there, in an old gritty neighborhood just west of downtown, in the company of folks I knew through church and classes, in a home culture driven by brothers, that the fundamentals of my creative taste and vision were formed. 

When I moved away, I bragged about Akron. I talked it up so well I think I lost some credibility. I can see why: if newcomers were to take a trip through the city via I-76, they wouldn’t see much to entice them. I think that’s why I praised it - I knew there was more than the first impression. I walked, biked, rollerbladed, and drove on the brick streets and cracked sidewalks. I hiked the trails (which sometimes could be hilly!). I knew some of the cultural centers and institutions all blessedly within driving distance. I stayed in the children’s hospital not knowing how convenient it was to live just ten minutes from one. And the folks I grew up with - oh, we were as human as anybody. But to see how they welcomed and delighted Virginia friends when they came for my wedding - that said everything I ever wanted to say. 

Today I am going back to Akron to bring a piece of home to what was once my home. In a suburban house, close to the one where I once scared the sleep out of a kid I babysat, in a mid-sized city pie-cut by two interstates and built by the tire industry, I’ll get to bring stories and music from Harpers Ferry. 

And, in fact, just as Akron was the incubator for my adulthood, Ohio had something to do with what developed in Harpers Ferry. I once watched contestants from Oberlin Conservatory perform in a piano competition, and I once went to my friend’s piano recital at the Western Reserve in Hudson. Both institutions, in their earliest forms, were either founded or supported by John Brown’s father. John Brown had grown up in abolitionist Hudson, Ohio, watching his father aid escaped slaves. He also had known one of his father’s apprentices, Jesse R. Grant. Jesse regarded John Brown as “a man of great purity of character, of high moral and physical courage, but a fanatic and extremist in whatever he advocated.” It was his extremism that led him to try to seize the armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859 and start a slave uprising with less than twenty men. 

That act accelerated the secession of the South, whose army was finally extinguished by the present-minded war execution of Jesse Grant’s son, General Ulysses S. Grant, another Ohio boy. (Read his memoirs sometime.

Ohio may not have the buried bullets or plunging vistas of Harpers Ferry, but it has the soil where great things can grow. Of course, the greatness of the Civil War is quite mixed - but that's not all that's come about. The Wright Flyer flew in Kitty Hawk, but the Wright brothers built it in Dayton. Apollo 11 launched from Florida, but Neil Armstrong learned to fly in Ohio. 

I don’t mean to get sentimental. But I truly believe Ohio was and still is a great place to grow up.

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