“When I start feeling nostalgic, I don't reach for what happened; I reach for where.”
Sean A. Scapellato is a writer living in Charleston, SC. When he's not working on whatever writing project has captured his attention, he practices law, mentors, and serves on the board of the Pat Conroy Literary Center.
Why does this piece mean ‘homing’ to you? How does it resemble your relationship to place?
Trauma is the downside of nostalgia. It forces its way between you and the happy pleasures of growing up. And yet, wanted or not, it stitches itself into our sense of identity and home. For me, this piece was a way to explore that assimilation. Because it was the first time I'd been nose-to-nose with the fragility of human life, and because I'd never written about it, the moment stuck. The surprise came in discovering how pivotal that experience played in how I feel about relationships, trauma, places, and story.
What impact did the physical places of childhood have on your writing? Is there somewhere you keep returning to, literally or in your work?
I don't often write about my childhood, but times when I have, it has a vitality and forcefulness that surprises me. My memory of it is crisp and detailed. I don't necessarily group these memories by event, but more by place and feeling. I think it's because the rites of passage dig deeper in our memory than others, and I latch onto the emotion and place almost like this indirect way of commenting on the event itself. It allows you to get closer to the red-hot experience of something vital without over-dramatizing, or emoting. In a roundabout way, the places create the emotion, and as a writer, that fascinates me.
There are several periods of growing up where I tend to linger (the older you get, the longer the "growing up" period!): my own grade-school years, my job in a hospital when I was sixteen, my early teaching experiences, the years when my kids were little. My memory is still giving me things to chew on from these personal epochs, and I think it's because my mind is not done exploring them.
Tell me about the connection between memory and art. How does the way we remember the physical world—and the events that happened there—influence our rendering of it?
If we're talking memory, I’m more drawn to the places of my youth. I dream about the houses I lived in—their floorplans, their tiny nooks, the hiding places of childhood games. I know where I was when something happened. For example, I know the wonky doorjamb of the glass door, the dead roach on the threshold, the graying dusk in the backyard—all this as I listened to my mother tell me her dad had just died. I think Hemingway said the best way to write about a place is from a place of longing. When I start feeling nostalgic, I don't reach for what happened; I reach for where. For this reason, I like returning to the places of long-ago firsts: first solo drive, first girlfriend, first loss, etc. There's rich soil there.
You name many people, places and streets throughout “the moon,” even though your readers are likely unfamiliar with them. How much of your definition of home relies on these names? These people?
I think of it like this: if you say apple, I think of an apple. If you say you were eating an apple in the treehouse you and two other friends built when the floor collapsed, now the apple is something I can never forget. The names and places matter (even if you have to change them). For me, they create immediate verisimilitude, and they help to capture the indelible-ness of the experience. A reader, I think, will respond that way, too. They don't care that my best friend growing up was Mark, but the places, the experiences, the underlying feeling of those places will give meaning to his name. We don't know Jem Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird at first, but after Boo Radley sews the hole in his pants and stays with him overnight when Bob Ewell breaks his arm, he becomes forever bound to those experiences in our minds.
When prompted to write about home, you reached for a lyric essay. What did it allow you to say that you couldn’t have otherwise? Why choose the crash as your subject?
That wreck was so violent, it almost shocks the senses that a young kid experienced it. My dad told me he probably hit that wall at 60 miles per hour. The mere thought of what happened did a number in my imagination for years. The effect of that might've been worse than actually witnessing the crash. In some ways, an event this life-changing seems essential to remember, to document, but I've never written about it until now. I don't know why.
Lyricism, when done well (and I'm not saying I've pulled this off!) creates a duality of sorts: There's the story, and then there’s the language. Interwoven, they create a layered reading experience. John Grisham is not as worried about the language as he is the story, and let's face it, eloquent descriptions of a Mississippi marsh would feel silly in a fast-paced thriller. However, if in an essay I'm trying to show you how an eight-year-old kid alarmingly witnesses the death of a young man, the language of that experience becomes just as much a part of the story as the experience itself. There's a paradoxical mystery in writing beautifully about a place where something terrible happens.
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the moon holds no grudges
Sean Scapellato | Nonfiction, Homing
a madman shakes a dead geranium
The word spread quickly. We all heard the sirens. Police cars, a fire truck, an ambulance all converging in a dopplerized haste. Word was someone had fallen into the creek culvert. We hopped on bikes and raced toward Central Drive. We knew the place because we’d watched the county carve out the cavernous spillway for the creek that fed into Spivey Lake. And we all knew Spivey Lake. None of us had actually seen the lake except on a map sitting peanut-shaped deep in the woods off Norman Road. We had invented the myth around Mr. Spivey like something out of To Kill a Mockingbird, except some of it was true, much not. Mr. Spivey was almost seven feet tall, a real madman across the water. He had fang-like teeth and a voice like an ogre (whatever that sounded like). If he caught you trespassing on his property, he would shoot at you with a shotgun that had special salt pellets designed to cause extreme agony.
The lore about Spivey also extended to the feeder creek that ran behind all our houses on Viking Drive. We built the treehouse along its banks waiting for the day it rained so hard the creek would flood. There were armies of cottonmouths in its waters just waiting for an ankle to draw near. We played war in the woods across the Blue, Byrd, and Hoffman houses, the creek peeling invisibly away before passing under Norman Road to the lake. If you fell in, we were quite certain the Stygian waters would rob your memory and scorch your soul. You didn’t cross unless you were going to someone’s house on Echo Woods, and even then, it was better to go by bicycle.
But at the Central Drive culvert, where the creek’s headwaters formed, the structure was massive: granite rocks the size of Volkswagens and concrete—at least twelve feet high—the pipe tall enough you could walk through it standing up. The spillway was twenty feet wide, before narrowing and terminating into the mudbanks and rocks that formed the creek. To cross under the road in the massive pipe was irresistible for children with active imaginations. We played like the poor guy whose job it was to stand there at the controls in the tunnel when the Death Star shot its planet-destroying green laser right past his face. On the other side, there were swamp and vines. That was the Dagobah system where, you know, the Jedi were born.
put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life
Not far away, a twenty-one-year-old mounted his brand-new motorcycle for its inaugural ride. He came into our neighborhood off Rays Road, down Cimmaron, left on Central Drive before hitting sixty miles per hour. When he misjudged the curve at Norway Lane, he overcorrected into wet grass, skidded, and lost control. The bike rammed the top lip of the culvert and launched into the air before colliding with the opposite wall and plunging the twelve feet to the ground.
The boy’s head struck the culvert wall so hard it cracked his helmet. The ambulance did not speed away.
Why no emergency lights? my friend Mark asked.
I guess they aren’t in a hurry, I said.
Later, my mom, a nurse, would say that’s a bad sign. The worst sign.
The next evening, I would return alone to the culvert. The moon sat low in the sky, and the remnant heat of an Atlanta summer incubated between the houses. I had to come through a backyard downstream just to get inside the steep walls. It had not rained in weeks, and its enormous corrugated pipe looked out of place as water trickled from it.
The motorcycle had been taken away, but its brokenness still peppered the ground. Pieces of orange and red plastic were strewn about. A shattered chrome mirror, bent and pointed, reflected the darkening sky. Black skids arced along the concrete where the tires must’ve continued to turn, a piece of the seat, a lever to something—it all pointed to the massive impact that had occurred overhead. Along the ground were peeled-back gauze wrappers like dead butterflies, a plastic needle cover, another one nearby, all at the periphery of a pool of blood. It was still, red and bright in the center, darkened at the penumbra, already flaking at the edges.
I stared at what stared back at me, this red-eyed planet. The feeling—and there is no other way to describe this—was a barely contained panic. A person barely older than I had breathed his last breath; his heart had made its final beat, and his soul grew still upon this lonely slab of concrete. How many times had he passed this very spot unaware? How many times had I? And when death did occur there, I wanted to know: did he call for his mother the way the dying soldiers at Normandy did? Was he alone as he waited for consciousness to leave his body on a breeze? Did he have time to miss what he would miss?
In the halls at Jolly Elementary, I listened for the chatter of older kids.
He lived in Abingdon Park. His name was Patrick (could never catch the last name). The bike had been a birthday gift. His youngest sister was pretty and attended Hambrick Elementary—the grade below us. One of the kids in 6th grade—his father was the paramedic on scene and wept at dinner as he told it. Legs burned, arms broken, there were brains on the helmet...his poor mother.
Some invisible hand pushed me to the culvert every evening for a week to observe the blood planet as it turned to black under a nickel moon. I came every day until the rain washed it away, and then I wept because that had been all that was left of him. Gone, washed into Spivey Lake.
memory throws up high and dry a crowd of twisted things
Here are the essentials: I am fifty-five years old. I have a mortgage and a job. Some time ago, I convinced a beautiful woman to marry me, and together we raised two decent kids. I can report my completion of the required reading many times over and the formation of opinions on the stuff elected folks like to fight about. Instead of social media shouting, I endeavor to find quiet wisdom in my acquired status of “senior” citizen. My generation remains dismayed at politics and as stubborn as mules. But like all of us, we have visited the old neighborhoods. We all have those terrible Zapruder films in our head with the sad tales of great loss. Nothing like that sort of nostalgia to end an issues debate. In my history, the football field is gone. The neighborhood pool and concessions stand torn out and updated. Three pickleball courts have spawned from one tennis court, and the old softball field is grassed over with barely the shadow of an infield.
My elementary school removed the monkey bars, the pipes, the gravel fields. No one plays there anymore. The black top—née the Experience Center, so termed by the legendary P.E. teacher with a bullhorn, Mr. McCleer—is now dirt beneath a building. Ms. Pittman who taught me to read and write is dead. Eve Economy, my sixth grade crush, has children in college and remains beautiful, albeit beautiful on Facebook.
Down Viking Drive, the Schultes split-level is there with the brown siding, but the pebble resin driveway crumbled decades ago. Behind them the Leonard’s backyard pool festers green with algae, more a graveyard for rusted tools and car batteries. The Solomon’s old home is stuffed with multiple AC window units and could quite possibly be a crack house. My own house sits isolated and hunched in a forest of pines, repainted, old, everything funhouse-mirror-different.
On the street, the spraypainted football field and stickball bases are lost in the strata of repavings, and no one knows when they buried the electrical lines. Google-Earth your childhood, and you will not enjoy it.
midnight shakes the memory
Despite a latch-key neighborhood gone to seed, the mind’s eye still remembers the massive afternoon games of kick-the-can. Every kid eight to sixteen hoped for the chance to yell “Olly Olly Oxen Free!” Stickball in the street was legendary, ringed with little brothers and sisters cheering their sibling’s team. There was that awkward kiss with Cathy Schulte along the brick wall of their garage (she skilled, me not). We counted the kids in the rhythm-method-families that lived in Norman Forest: twelve Nguyens, nine Schultes next to six Elzes with the remnant Catholics filling in with singles, pairs, and trios. The summer Shelly Leonard became what Chucky Conners called “well-rounded,” I was the one she chose for midnight summer talks on her driveway. I got to steal glimpses as she lay on her back in that terrycloth tanktop. I coughed through my first cigarette on the Ayer’s trampoline behind the greenhouse, rode a hundred bike rides to 7-Eleven for slurpees, and participated eagerly in the Match Wars in John Blue’s driveway. Anyone remember the time he set off that homemade bomb in his backyard? The crater was the size of a small swimming pool, and the blast shattered the back windows.
Back then, the rumble of night trains along the spine of Clarkston became the lullaby for sleepless dreams. I remembered the summer the Knight brothers and I built the treehouse. That was the summer it fell with us in it, and David gashed his thigh on the way down. The winter before was the blizzard of ’82 where I-285 became a parking lot, and Atlantans literally abandoned their vehicles on the interstate. We staged sledding races well past streetlight-dark down the giant hill on Norman. Parents slowly began arriving home, some after midnight, and for several hours WE WERE IN CONTROL.
Mark Milovich and I—agents provocateurs—graduated from throwing water balloons at cars to sneaking them out. We shot BB guns at blue jays, pranked the old neighbors, and double-bounced each other at the neighborhood pool. We were touch football, tennis (and sledding) champs, the street’s bra-snappers, and we knew things—how to get into the sewers if the ball rolled in, how to fake out Mark Hoffman on a blitz, how to paint a model A-7 Corsair. We had a years-long ping-pong tournament still running in his basement, an encyclopedic knowledge of Browns and Steelers football, and major Atari Asteroids chops. He was my ride to Milam Park, my ride or die for 2-on-2 sports, the fount of Socratic wisdom about the things that mattered: girls, music, sports, beer.
And even though he was older and even though he knew more things, neither he nor I could ever explain—not even to this day—why a kid with a new motorcycle had to die on a birthday joy ride down Central Drive. Why so young? Why so in front of all of us?