Akron

October 6, 2007

Went downtown last night, onto the cleanly, all-but-deserted streets of Akron. It looked forlorn and sort of lovely all at once. One center of activity was the corner of Summit and Market, where there is a new arts center in an old building, including The Bang and the Clatter, which I suppose is nearly the only independent theater company of its kind in the area. The theater was a pleasantly amateurish set-up on the second floor, and the play was Eric Coble’s The Dead Guy. The evening had nothing to recommend it but adequate performances–in the lead’s case a quite good performance-- of a play that was all premise, and a flawed premise at that. After arising at 2 and traveling all day, I could barely keep my eyes open, and after a while stopped trying. It was a bad play, actually, and I mention that to point up still more dramatically the enthusiasm of the little crowd, which didn’t care that it was a bad play, only that it was OUR bad play. I went to see how my life would be if I had stayed here. I don’t think, now, that I would ever have been any of the people I saw in that room.


Things I had forgotten about Akron: its intense enthusiasm for Halloween. Halloween decorations are up all over, many of them quite elaborate. The lawn across the street from my father’s is turned into a graveyard, with a forest of tombstones with ghoulish saying on them, interspersed with skeletons and ghosts arising from the grass. The theater offered snacks of Halloween candy-- sugar pumpkins and those bright kernels of corn the taste of which is so distinctive–in bowls shaped like pumpkins and the hands of monsters. Almost every house acknowledges the season. The second thing is its sports-mindedness. A radio was playing in the theater lobby with the Indians/Yankees game on it, and the Indian victory was trumpeted at intermission.

Bought dad an expensive new computer system yesterday, which he will be happy with, I think, because he can actually use it. I will buy him a notebook to store all the passwords which he seems unable now to remember, even if he used it five minutes before. My organic inability to repeat myself runs headlong into dad’s increasing inability to hear anything, and his need to hear twice even if he has.

I would be well into my first day in Dublin about now, had things gone the way I’d planned.