Maybe it was the surge of rain and wind in Kenmore this week, the attendant temperature drop a reminder that autumn has arrived. Clouds rolled in and through, and hot summer nights suddenly became covered in blankets and flannel. So when I stumbled over a paperback book I thought I’d long since discarded, I was in the perfect mood to appreciate it again.
I read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which has nothing to do with the former and a little about the latter, as the Nixon administration entered its crash-and-burn phase, during shop-floor breaks in a car factory (we were building rear axles for the Chevrolet Vega at the time). A book about “the metaphysics of quality,” about fathers and sons, and vaguely about the several ways to understand Truth (capital ‘T,’ and it had no connection to the Vega, a spectacularly bad car engineered and produced during the first of the American auto industry’s recurrent nervous breakdowns), it provided me a calm enlightenment, a quiet illumination, something I could have used in intervening years. It convinced me not to accept anything purporting to be “the real deal” if it comes wrapped in grandeur and splendor (including churches, heavy metal music and the Super Bowl).
A story from Chapter 16 stayed in my mind, about a college student preparing a 525-word essay on the topic of the United States. Narrow the topic, her professor urged; nothing of substance could be written about a subject so large in a space so small. So she focused on her hometown, on a single block, on a single structure, and presented a 4,000-word report about the bricks of the front wall of a building on Main Street.
This might be why I’m better suited to life in Kenmore than, say, New York City. I enjoy noticing the small things, too (the students’ college career took place in Bozeman, Mont., incidentally, population slightly greater than that of Kenmore).
Kenmore had a reputation that included a long-gone “Jewish neighborhood.” It is estimated to be 2.1 percent Jewish today, but look around and note the sukkahs currently in evidence on front lawns and upstairs front porches. We’re embarking on Sukkoth this month, the annual “Feast of Tabernacles” that includes the installation of a temporary sukkah, a small hut to remind the faithful of what the Jews lived in during their 40 years of exile after the exodus from Egypt. It is a remembrance of “wandering in the desert,” and it’s bad form to assume your neighbors are getting an early start on constructing a Christmas nativity scene.
You pay attention, you notice and understand things, and the quality of life goes up stratospherically. Not far from the spooky old Eberhardt Mansion, the Village’s official mascot at the intersection of Delaware and Kenmore Avenues, you’ll see young people playing football on a sloping lawn where an adjacent mansion, razed in 1978, once stood. Next door on Delaware is a block of fenced-off buildings that are about to come down, making way for a residential and business tract (stores and offices downstairs, apartments upstairs, what urban planners and real estate speculators call “multi-use development”). The compound was a car dealership; one structure was in continuous use as an auto sales-and-service place since 1922. Another was more recently built on the site of Myron A. Phelps’ home, he being a former mayor of Kenmore.
Phelps’ place was the second house to be built in Kenmore (circa 1898, Eberhardt’s being the first), and renovated beyond recognition to the point that no one considered it a travesty of historical treasure when it was flattened in the 1980s. When I arrived in Kenmore it was occupied by an organization called the New Testament Christian Community (without any disrespect, if you understand the term “hippie Jesus freaks,” you’ll get the idea). I can’t walk past the place, on my way to The Buffalo Room for chicken wings, without thinking of them (or of old Mayor Phelps; a photograph of the house, printed in a 1998 picture book of historic Kenmore, includes a Jaguar XK-E dodging a massive Delaware Avenue pothole. This is why I embrace culture clashes).
There was, in 1996, a briefly popular song called “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” by the California alternative rockers Primitive Radio Gods, with lyrics of morose and plaintive desperation and an occasional sampling of B.B. King (“I’ve been downhearted baby, ever since the day we met”) sailing in and out as though it left on the airwaves of a Memphis radio station in 1952, bounced off a planet and returned intact to interfere with the tune. If you’re old enough to appreciate history, keep your eyes open and take time to examine some of the influences in your long life, these sorts of delicious mashups tend to make perfect and elegant sense.
Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears weekly in the Record-Advertiser. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.
