I love Lock Haven in the summer. It's okay in the winter, too, but I usually don't like anything in the winter because, well, I don't like the winter. It isn't personal, oh Havenites. It just is. But Lock Haven in the summer ... there's just something about it that makes me feel good. Like sittin' in Mayberry with an ice cold Cherry Coke. Small-town summertime with Penn's Quiet Woods all around.
Up and down the avenue, the businesses set out their hand-lettered signs. The florist: "A Dozen Roses, $12.99." The coffeehouse: "Get in here and get some drinks! They're good!" Gio's Cut and Color: "Men's Haircuts, $10." The used-furniture place on the corner: "Ken's is OPEN." (Oh, and by the way, that's Ken standing outside, scouting the street for business.) The Hangar 9 advertises their lunch specials and weekend music on a marquee-style billboard.
That summery feeling is everywhere, in every common thing: open the door to Puff's and you can stand and smell the cigars, get a grape soda out of the cooler and a whip of beef jerky four feet long for 4 bucks. Go down to Ashworx and smell the sage and patchouli wafting out around the seams of the door to scent the air like India. Angle back up the other side of the avenue and go into Walker's Hardware, and you'll find yourself in another era: it smells of sawdust and oil and grease; the men behind the counter still wear flannel shirts, suspenders, and dirty caps; you can get help with, "Hey!"; you can buy baggies of wax-bottle Coke candies and Peachy-O rings and Maple Nut Goodies and Gummy Bears from a turntable by the door for 50 cents apiece, or packets of seeds: flowers of all kinds, squash and runner beans and cucumbers and tomatoes.
Of an evening, walk down Main Street with its herringbone-brick pattern and buy a ticket for a movie at the Roxy. This is my favorite thing: it was in this theater, during high summer of '05, in the cool cavern of Screen One still decorated with heavy draperies and sconces in a throwback to an earlier time, with the Star Wars theme song booming against the walls, that I first realized I was free -- 600 miles away from home and starting over, ushering in a brand-new start with box candy and buttery popcorn. I still get a thrill like that in the Roxy, 6 years later: an electric feeling up my spine, the sensation of the world flinging wide its doors and letting me in.
That I would run to embrace it in a small town kind of surprises me, given that I came from one much like it and wanted to get as far away from that as possible at one point in my life. I'm still not sure I want to stay here forever: there are draws to other places for me, always have been. I'm an explorer. A goer. A seer. A doer. There are possibilities waiting for me all around, and it's all I can do to keep myself from running to try everything like I'm at a Chinese buffet for the first time and everything smells so good. Bright lights? Lots of people? Every corner opening to another experience, another hidden world? Sounds good to me. Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Philly; anywhere, everywhere: the thought that if I so choose, I can someday pick a graduate school to attend and move there makes me absolutely giddy. The only drawback would be leaving my little family behind.
For now, though, I am content to stay. A little restless, but content. I can stand out on my balcony and watch the mountains roll away in every direction, massive sighs of dark, leafy green, and feel cradled in this valley with the West Branch going sparkling by under the sun. I can walk into the deli, the coffee shop, the book shop, and people know my name and what I want: chai; chicken panini, no onions, and pasta with sun-dried tomatoes; period fiction if ya got anything, and oh, a bag of those chocolate-covered pretzel sticks with the sprinkles on them. I am polar opposites wound into the same soul: predictable, but spontaneous. Just as likely to drop everything and shout, "Let's go (on a road trip to New York; see this or that or so-and-so; do fill-in-the-blank)! as I am to tell you that no, I will not wear a turtleneck no matter how much you pay me, that I do not, under any circumstances, consume anything that has been pickled in anything else, and that I will not share my personal space with you overnight unless I really, really like you or your house is on fire and there's absolutely nowhere else in the world for you to go.
I've enough happiness in front of me at this point in time: one more semester before my field internship; learning to conquer my fear of deep water; rolling down the levee for the hell of it; going to my first baseball game; murder mystery dinners with Mama; episodes of "Raising Hope" with Dad; hitting up the new Chinese restaurant with Bizzy; heading to Camel Beach this Saturday -- most of them simple things, small, ordinary, but no less amazing for that. For now, I will stay in Mayberry and drink my Coke, and the summer will roll on like the river while I stay put. It won't be Cherry Coke, though. Blech.
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