This morning the fog was so thick on the plateau it blurred all the trees but when I got up the road you could see the very edge of it, like where the fog officially began or ended in the sky, and with the sun shining beneath it it lit the tops of the tall trees golden brown, the edge of the fog an angry-looking wall. Fall is a time that forces reflection, a passageway, that reminds us we are always falling, always passing from the living to the dead. That line in the sky made by the fog looked like the edge of a cape it was so dark, worn by a season either swooping in or just headed out.

I remember the first time I saw the poetic significance in fall. I was a teenager living in Bethlehem, PA: that town romanticized in a Billy Joel song ‘Allentown,’ a song about a once-great place in decline. By the 80s the area was in a slump, more of a macro economic problem but one we blamed on the Puerto Ricans. They banded together at my school and moved in groups, spoke loud, wore different clothes. Downtown started to feel more like Penn Station with souped-up Toyotas and young guys looking feral. But it wasn’t the Puerto Ricans to blame, it was the new mall up the road that killed downtown Allentown. None of that made it into the Billy Joel song.

My parents got their first house on 12th street and after a few years we moved to the more comely Bethlehem. We’d had not one but two used Cadillacs stolen, parked right out front, both late 60s models and both gifted to my dad from a colleague. They weren’t worth much, but were highly coveted by car thieves and gangster types: one a Coupe de Ville, the other Sedan de Ville, each a shade of 60s metallic green with V8 engines and whitewall tires, bench-style seating, white leather interior. Pimp cars, to be exact. So long and stately they were, dad called them “boats.” It was as close as we got to luxury in those days and dad was proud of those cars, but now it felt like where we lived wasn’t safe and we’d have to move.

The people on our street were not-quite middle class, or just barely, or just old. Next door was a woman named Evelyn Black who lived with her adult son Roy. They both smoked like chimneys right up until the end, Roy going down first. Across the street was an old guy named Woody who died one day and dad had to help move the body—not something he’d ever done, judging by the looks of him later.

Like Billy Joel said, Bethlehem was a steel town but hadn’t been hit by the downturn like Allentown had. There was a downtown with cute shops, a well-respected university, nice-looking neighborhoods with Tudor homes and hardwood floors. And it had a good neighborhood, up from the railroad tracks that curled along the Lehigh River and beneath the hills that formed Bethlehem’s south side. In my thrift store trench coat I’d go walking and smoking and moping about. And that first fall I remember the look of the hillsides as the leaves changed to a calico pattern, blotched yellow, green and brown. Something just switched in me then and I knew I had to write.

There’s that moment with addicts they’ll remember that first feeling, like when they’ve bonded with the substance or the thing and it clicks: there’s also a positive version of that, another form of bonding that has nothing to do with substances but feels similar, and it has the same sudden effect like a switch. It may be chemical in nature too, where the right forces conspire to create something new. Or to activate something that’s always been inside us. They are both a calling. Both appear as pleasure on the surface; one opens you up and the other walls you off.

There are multiple paths like this in our lives, multiple forks, some larger than others and some small, like tributaries leading to rivers leading to seas where everything gets taken apart and erased.

Maybe this is why would-be artists coming of age reject their hometown, this idea that to make it you’ve got to leave it, as if opportunity is always somewhere else. Or that the leaving will change you. Or that you have to take yourself apart to learn how things work inside. So I had to leave, which I did without looking back.

Billy Joel never actually lived in Allentown but had a place not far as I understand, probably Bucks County. Being a New Yorker it makes sense he’d want a place to get away to, somewhere quiet and quaint. Because no matter how good things are for us we are all looking to get away, somewhere we are not known.

I think the seasons pass through us and we’re more affected by them than it seems. Fall gives us a chance to look back, to harvest, and to prepare for the dark days ahead.

There is just the hook of a moon now like a scythe in the morning sky or a set of horns. Looking at something so far away like that it’s hard to tell where it begins or ends. You can pinpoint a time in your life you thought something started but maybe that’s just when you first noticed. Chances are it’s always been there. Like the horizon, I guess it’s just where things come together. And even that isn’t real except for the person who sees it.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Addiction, allentown, Creative Nonfiction, identity, Memoir, prose