7 Broughton Rd
Edinburgh EH7 4EW
www.tesco.com
by Beau Cadiyo
On Thursday, I was researching a potential customer for work. On their website they bragged that they had locations "All Along I-90."
"I-90?" I thought. "Which interstate is that?"
And Jesus wept.
I brought up Google Maps to confirm my suspicions, and saw the familiar route laid out from New England to Montana. I zoomed in and saw Ohio, and zoomed in further and saw Cleveland, and then Dead Man's Curve, and wondered: is there a list somewhere of all of the dead men who have proven that name right? I saw Historic Asiatown and imagined the first Asian settlers in Cleveland, and what their experiences must have been like - I assume that they were coast-dwelling when they left Asia, and I wondered what they made of the Cleveland winters, and how they made a living on Lake Erie, and if it was a better life than they would have had if they had stayed at home, and what happened to their descendants. I saw Irishtown Bend, and thought of a lecture I had attended before I moved away where the speaker described the shantytowns that Irish immigrants occupied on the west bank of the Cuyahoga, and how they looked out from their huts toward the millionaires of the East Side. I wondered if they were ever angry at their lot, if they ever cursed the day they left Ireland, what dramas existed in their communities. I saw Tremont and its most prominent map pin: the Christmas Story House, and wondered how many children's Christmas dreams were inspired by that Hollywood standard, and how many adults felt a sort of false nostalgia for an ideal that never existed, and then remembered that I had grown up with the little sister of Zach Ward, the actor who played the bully, and how the one time I had hung out with him as an adult it was also with his wife, who was pregnant, and his best friend, and how later it turned out that his wife was having an affair with his best friend, and how angry I was about that when I had heard, because in reality, he was about the nicest guy you could imagine.
And then, in a rush, there were the specific memories of being on I-90. There was the surprise trip I took to Chicago, in the middle of winter, when there was a sudden cold snap and it was -10º and there were snow drifts blowing across the lanes and I realized that the girl who was driving could not talk about anything other than running and herself, so I challenged her to say something that did not involve either subject, and she failed. All weekend, she failed. There was one particular early morning drive to get breakfast with Mike, Meredith, and Ted at the West Side Market cafe, driving West with the sun in my rear-view mirror, and I passed the sign for Brahtenahl and realised that I knew nobody in that mystical no-go land for very rich people. There was the time in February, just before Valentines Day, 2015, when it was 2º outside and I was driving into work and a convertible passed me on the right side, top down, the driver in a tee-shirt and shades, and I thought: "Holy shit - THIS is Cleveland Strong." And there was January 3, 2014, driving back from Montreal, trying just to get out of the Canadian ice; we had tried to get back a day earlier but the snow had piled up and so we had pulled off into a hotel on the side of the road, frozen and bitter, and I had vowed not to spend another cent until we got to America again, and then when we were finally in Buffalo, we stopped at a diner that turned out to be a mob hangout, and when we got back on I-90 I was overcome with relief, cruising smoothly back home.
And something seemed off on the map, sort of like in a story where there is an alternate universe and everything is just off enough to make the reader a bit uncomfortable. I looked closer, zoomed in and out, and realised that, in the five years since I had left, things had changed...a bit. But that was not quite it. I felt like I was looking at a map of a place that I had no personal connection to. I started looking up places I knew; Bac's had closed. Bonbon has closed. The Ontario Street Cafe has closed.
The Ontario Street Cafe?
When my grandfather died, my sister inherited boxes and boxes of his writings - records of his half-mad ramblings against individuals, entities, the universe. On one, he had listed wrongs that people had committed against him, real or perceived, and next to each one he had written: "IS THIS JUSTICE?" When I thought of the nights spent on those plastic benches, with random nurses and shift workers sharing the booth with me and my friends, buying $2 glasses of Black Velvet and sending one to the guy in the lounge suit trying to chat up a girl spilling out of her jeans because he had been cool to me earlier and I wanted to give him some social proof...how the fuck did Cleveland let this happen? Am I imagining ten halcyon years in that city? Are all of my memories being erased, slowly and irreversibly, by time and distance and progress? Is that why the map looks so different?
Then I realized that it was not the closed restaurants and bars that felt off, but the fact that there were no Google Maps Favorites. Anywhere. Zero. That couldn't be right; I had plenty when I moved away, and I don't think that they just expire, do they? Then I felt stupid. I was on my work computer, and it does not have any of my personal favorites saved on Google Maps, so of course no pins showed up.
But I HAD forgotten I-90, and I realize that I-90 has forgotten me, Cleveland has forgotten me, and that so much of my life has been relegated to the dust bin of history already by moving away, and simply by being alive. That has been a theme tattooing in my head recently: the complete and utter transience of our memories, and memories of ourselves. This is particularly piercing now that I have a son and I know that every day he is forming new thoughts and memories himself, and I get to guide him on that path, and at the same time I have memories that he will never know, and my father has memories that I could only guess at: what the inside of his schoolroom in Africa looked like, the smell of his mother's hair after it had been washed, the feel of his medical scrubs when he put them on for the first time, how he felt when he first kissed my mother. What did his father, my grandfather, think when he became a silk baron in Lyon in the 1920s, after being a German prisoner in World War I, and what did he think as he fled Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded - what did they pack up, what did they leave behind, never to see again? And what about the other trillions of memories that are being made daily - do we accept that they will be forgotten one day, totally erased, as if they had never existed? That fucks me up: not the idea that we will be forgotten, but that our memories will be forgotten, are already being reworked, destroyed, even in our own minds. Death will come, one day, to me, and I accept that; what is more difficult for me to accept is that my own experiences will vanish.
And I want to matter to Cleveland the way Cleveland matters to me, because it does matter to me. To me, it is still the greatest place I have ever lived, the best city with the most beautiful community. I have so many fond memories there, and...well, I am disappointed in myself that so many of the places I used to go, like the Ontario Street Cafe, won't be there when I return. And don't bring up Lady Luck Casa Lounge II. FFS. I was supposed to return in May for Eric's wedding, and then it was pushed back to October, and...well, America, you aren't handling this pandemic very well. Dare I visit the week of the election? I mean, the memories that I would form would be incredible...
Having said all that, one thing I would like to forget is the coronation chicken sandwich from Tesco that gave me food poisoning. I should have learned my lesson the last time.
