This series of personal sketches was drawn from the ‘hometown memories’ of students in response to watching Lowell Blues, a short film by Henry Ferrini based on readings from Jack Kerouac’s written recollections of growing up in Lowell, MA.

– Fred Bouchard, Associate Professor of Liberal Arts

When I am young and naïve and careless, and stupid; when I am awkward, and nerdy and innocent and dreaming of the day when I’ll finally leave the Illinois cornfields behind; when I am just beginning to realize the difference between what I’ve been given and the things I truly want instead—at this age I actually happen to be the smart one. At this age, when my mind is teetering back and forth between boys and popularity and boys and popularity and boys but never actually landing on either, much less getting close enough to one in order to taste what I assume would be exhilarating, fascinating and perfect; failing to meet the blonde-haired, blue-eyed expectation of Midwestern beauty which I then wanted so badly to encompass—yes, this is when I am told I can be anything I want to be.

I was “gifted” then. I had the pleasure-curse of being the token black girl all my years in school district 186 because I could count and add and subtract and multiply and divide and isolate and solve and graph and find the limit. Because I loved to learn! Because my parents showed me School House Rock and Cyberchase and Arthur and told me that no, we weren’t going to the movies—we were going H to the O to the M to the E, and that I needed to eat three-fourths of the Brussels sprouts on my plate, or I would be getting four-fourths of a spanking. Because later on I truly “fell in like” with Calculus and the way the numbers always lined up and how there was always a clear-cut answer for everything, just like the answer to whether or not SHG would cream us in football again or whether or not I would attend community theater auditions with all the other Springfieldians who had nothing better to do. People knew I would excel because I surprised them all. People treated me differently once they heard me sing or play because I had the gift of musical healing, too; they actually wanted to talk to me, hear my opinion. Back then people actually encouraged me to follow my heart.

Then I did. The response was a little different than I expected. I think most people assumed I was going to pursue Music Education, or Psychology with a minor in Music, or even just Musical Theater like every other Springfield choir kid. My parents actually knew my heart and their own hearts and how easy and secure and reasonable and unfulfilling that Math degree would be for me and how foreign and illogical and humbling and perfect that Music degree would be. How much I just really needed to leave. In the end they loved me the same. Secretly, sometimes I almost (almost) wished that Berklee said no so that I could go on wallowing in my pride and waving around that giant U. I could put the bumper sticker on my guitar case, so people knew which music school I was going to but also knew that I could go back to Math at any point if I wanted and bathe in the warm Miami sun, knowing that I had finally escaped the prison that is corn. I knew where my heart truly lied, though, so I packed up my room and changed my Facebook location to Boston (and to my shame probably also wrote some prideful status about “leaving the patch”), suppressed my excitement for 20 short hours and drove with my parents to the east coast.

Maybe it’s a relatable memory, maybe not. I guess I don’t really care whether or not someone else’s experience fits my own, though, because this is a Hometown memory. And my hometown was a true hometown where people know who you are and you know all the people and choices matter and friends change when exposed to the true city, the type of town where people look down on the community college and people look down on the trade school and people worship the out-of-state. In my hometown, the folly of children is romanticized and coddled while the dreams of men and women are hushed and unimportant. Because ironically enough, money is everything in Cornland and fulfillment is nothing.