There is a small building on a corner in Ralston, Nebraska (my own place, if I was asked to claim one) that houses the Ralston Archives.
The corner the building sits on is found at a three-way intersection across from the main baseball diamond in Ralston. The building is gray, is one story, and bears a wrap-around white porch. It is neatly landscaped, complete with a great white stone tablet bearing the building’s name, and there are four windows on the building.
But here’s the thing about the windows--if you look very closely, you will discover that the windows of the building aren’t really windows at all, but are instead paintings of windows. The building is actually windowless.
If you were not familiar with the history of the building, you would think this a strange thing. A closer look at the faux windows might conjure images of a community theater prop room, as though these windows were leftovers from a production of “A Doll's House,” or as though someone had violated the stage notes of “Our Town” and had rigged a set. The painted drapes hanging in the painted windows are taupe. The painted frames of the painted windows are white. Not exactly masterworks, but not exactly unpleasant. If they were real windows, they would probably be pleasant enough, if unremarkable. If they were real, they would probably just go unnoticed, in the same way they go unnoticed if you are just driving by the building; at least, you do not notice at a glance that they are not real. In this, they are kind of masterworks of unremarkability, a kind of weird suburban camouflage.
If the windows were not there, what would sit on the corner would be a great gray bunker with a wrap-around porch. When I imagine the building without windows, I always start to think about those pale and eyeless cave lizards I’ve seen in magazines.The faux windows are also interesting because, while the drapes are largely open, the lights are painted permanently off.
Anyway. Who would paint such things?
I do not know the answer to this question, but I do know why the building bears false windows rather than real ones: when the building was commissioned by the City of Ralston, the historian acting as consultant recommended that, in order to protect any paper from the deleterious effects of sunlight, the building be constructed windowlessly. The building, with it’s main floor owning roughly 1,000 square feet, is not that large—if you were to walk in the front door, you would see that it is essentially one great room, and indeed many delicate documents are on display. Programs from high school football games in the fifties, various species of diplomas and citations, and framed photographs (in both black and white and color) of city councils, sewing clubs, milkmen, grammar school classes, local families, and mayors populate the walls.
So having no windows makes a kind of sense if what you’re after is preservation of physical history.
But what kind of sense does having painted windows make? What is that effort trying to preserve? And who cares if it works?
These questions are just a handful among the many I have about my hometown. And I have many.
In a way, I consider my local place a lot like it’s archives building: it houses a world of meaning, but because of certain aspects (of American culture), that meaning is not easily viewed--at least, not passively. Understanding what it offers requires an active participant.
In other words, as far as understanding my place goes, I can’t just glance in its windows. I will need to go inside and root around in order to discover the ecological, cultural, and historical riches my place has to offer.
Furthermore, I will need to carry the stuff out to others if I want to share it. Civic participation, baby.
A little biography: I am an English teacher at Ralston High School working on my Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln with a collateral field in Rhetoric and Composition. On the student status line of my digital transcript it says “Less Than Part Time.”
While I go to graduate school at UNL, I live and teach in Ralston, Nebraska, a kind of city within a city in Omaha, Nebraska. The population of Ralston is around 6,000, and it is physically landlocked by Omaha and the neighboring community of Papillion- LaVista. Ralston has its own city government, its own school district, its own chamber of commerce, and its own parks system. It is a strange little experiment in micropolitics, and many would say a successful one.
I am a townie. My grandfather George Lacey moved to Ralston in 1945 and my father and his brothers grew up in Ralston and I grew up in Ralston and my children are growing up in Ralston. Is all that good or bad? Ask me on my deathbed.
The family manse.
Obviously, it is not, for me, unpleasant. But it is not the only place I acknowledge as a part of me. I also consider myself a Nebraskan as well as a Ralstonite, and when my wife and I lived in Tucson Arizona for a year, I fell in love with the Sonoran Desert.
So there it is.
To conclude, I leave you with a poem. But not one of my own. I am using this class as an opportunity to collect poems about place that I might be able to use with my students, and I will try to post one every week. Here is the first by a great poet and native Nebraskan named Don Welch. It a good poem for anyone who has ever lived in--and perhaps loved--a place whose beauty others miss.
And here’s to a great class.
NEBRASKA
Going west when the sun is going down,
following the highways like light cords.
***
If Nebraska was the name of a Russian woman,
they could love her.
***
There would be a certain large-boned beauty about her.
***
Or she would be dressed in black and lace.
her waist would be small,
and she would drag her long dress over a floor
into a study lined with French books.
***
She would be a pawn in huge novels of war.
***
As it is, she is a woman of spare beauty.
***
Turning away from him so that the fine hollows
of her back were toward the bed,
she said, Why do you do this to me?
***
Why do you keep imagining me in other
places and states?
***
And why do you keep assuming our children
are unhappy?
