Eleven of Sixteen: City of Blue Trucks
Fort Wayne is the world headquarters of North American Van Lines, whose distinctive sky blue rigs wander lonely as clouds continually through the city, waiting for a berth. You see them orbiting on the bypass, idling in the far reaches of parking lots, a herd of them huddled together. Air brakes sneeze; running lights run. They've come to hub, to shift and sort and reload loads, to pool then peel away again, pulmonary pods, heaping beasts. Growing up, I liked thinking of the drifting blue trucks, counted them instead of sheep, each of them, I imagined, tared with another living room or parlor, each trailer transporting a suspended domestic setting, dreaming itself. Animated places crept by, a place parade, a parade of place, places looking for places to go and then going. The whole country, in individual dots and dashes, circulating through my city, the furnishings of its atriums entering the chambered city, this contracting, this expanding heart. And then, in another blue beat or two, beat it out of town.
Twelve of Sixteen: The Happiest City in America
In 1948, LOOK magazine designated Fort Wayne as "The Happiest City in America." I ask my mother, who is pictured on the cover with a group of high-school girls huddled laughing at a soda fountain: What is the source of all the happiness? In the water? In the air? Where did it go, she asks her picture, the photos of the photo spread? The photographer had no need to ask anyone to smile.
Fifteen of Sixteen: On the Planet of the Apes
"Where are you from?" Dr. Zaius, the suspicious ape in the movie Planet of the Apes, asks Charlton Heston, the marooned confused astronaut, who warily responds: "Fort Wayne." And the theater goes bananas where we watched (in Fort Wayne), howling, raucous primate applause. I believe we all wanted the film to stop and start over again and return to the place again where a made-up character uttered his made-up hometown that happened to coincide with our real hometown. I have heard people on vacation visit fictional places, send postcards from such places. Greetings from Green Gables, say, Sunnybrook Farm, say, Field of Dreams. Places that have become (through fiction) real. This real place (Fort Wayne) is authenticated by a bit of fiction, a bit of fiction within a fiction.
"Where are you from?" the ape asks.
"Fort Wayne!" Moses answers. The Promised Land.
"Me too!" we all respond, "Me too!"
Thirteen of Sixteen: A Sense of Place
We often speak of a sense of place, that a piece of writing can, at best, approximate a place, suggest the sensation of the surroundings, suggest a sense of sensing. The story simulates, at best, and perhaps needs only to stimulate a vague peripheral nimbus of locale and that is enough to satisfy. A sense of place suggests our alienation from place. It puts us in our place about place. We approach the world on a tack, askance, nuanced, alien and alienated, receding, just out of reach.
Sixteen of Sixteen: A Bottle in a Message
Once I got a coconut from Hawaii. Its hull hulled with stamps. My address and the stamp the only message. From the Smoky Mountains, I sent a little souvenir-a toy black bear crated in a tiny balsa wood box. Often postcards are not about the words alone-not the message in the bottle at all. The bottle itself the message. The medium and the means of transportation, transporting the places temporarily inhabited. Once the postal service would deliver almost anything from anywhere to anywhere if it had enough postage. I always wanted to send a door, unhinged and varnished with stamps, a souvenir of a place I once entered or left. Instead, in hotel rooms now, I strip the door of its framed legal notice encrypted with information that a safe will be provided-that the traveler cannot knowingly defraud the innkeeper-and use it as my souvenir postcard, an accurate indicator of where I'm at, where I've been. This explains everything, I write, an illustration of explanation. I write: Wish you were here.
Fourteen of Sixteen: The City of Conductors
Fort Wayne was division point for all the railroads that once ran through it. The Pennsy, the Wabash, the Big Four, the Nickel Plate, the New York Central, the Monon, and the streets of the downtown were clotted by conductors-passenger train conductors in their dark serge uniforms and freight conductors in stiff bib denim. They moved in time, on schedule with the trains, consulting their railroad pocket watches, carrying their tool bags and flares, ticket punches and key rings. Next door to everyone who was not a conductor, a conductor lived who worked strange hours on long drags to Chicago or Lima or bid highballing varnish to Indianapolis or Cleveland. Next door to us was a conductor, Mr. Kelker, who had lost both hands cleanly cut in an accident. He'd tell us stories. How the city was once a city of conductors, how it felt once to hold time in his hands, and how it felt to live, there, in what was once a destination and how it felt once to feel and how it felt now to feel the phantom feel of fleeting feeling, the subtle texture of absence, the heft of loss, the substantial mass of all that nothing in your hands.
Views of My Glasses
Black plastic frames top the top halves of the lenses that are outlined below with silver wire rims. Silver rivets at each top corner of the frame and at the points where the temples are attached. The delicate clear plastic pads rest on each side of the nose. The pads are connected to filaments of wire that corkscrew with the twist of a dental instrument and then, with a touch of solder, are stapled to the wire frame. A silver metal bridge, etched with streamlining filigree, spans the gap between the plastic brows, grafted into slots, pinned by pins just slightly larger than this period. Men's glasses. The glasses of the Eisenhower administration, the Kennedy administration, the Johnson administration. NASA glasses. Vince Lombardi glasses. Colonel Sanders glasses. Malcolm X glasses.
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"I will never see you again," the optometrist told me as he fit my glasses to my head. Delicately, with two fingers of each hand at each hinge, he wobbled the frame on my nose and then removed it. He turned away to bury a plastic earpiece in the chemical sand. "These will never break," he said, looking at the sand. "They were built by NASA engineers."
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A pair of glasses. It is like a pair of pants, a pair of pliers-one object composed of two joined similar parts that depend on each other. My left eye has always been stronger, though both have needed correction since I was in fourth grade. My first pair was from Sears. The temple pieces were anodized aluminum and contained, in a compartment near each hinge, hidden tiny springs that tensed the temples to hug my head. They left a mark, an indentation even.
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The plastic part of mine is black. The company calls it ebony. And the metal trim is silver. There are variations of color. Black Briar. Grey Briar. Mocha. Tortoise. All can be combined with gold wire fittings instead of the silver. All the plastic colors can be molded to simulate wood grain, but that is a whole other line in the catalog.
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The silver metal bridge piece, the ligature between the contrasting black plastic brows, can look, if you look quickly, like it actually has been broken there and then taped. I have worn glasses taped that way. I used black electrician's tape but the adhesive was gummy. White athletic tape was better. I've taped the temples too, swelling at the hinge, a gall at the fork of a twig. The tape on the bridge turned gray after I punched the slipping frames back up my nose. The frame's internal integral supporting spring was sprung by the break never to be right again. The tape grew spongy and soft.