On Webster Groves, Missouri

Rosalind Little moved away from Webster Groves, Missouri when she was thirteen years old, never really to return. This is an disruption in her life's narrative that continues to disorient her. She's still getting used to the move.

What do you think? Is it accurate to say that Webster Groves her is home town? Or is she from the town in Georgia where she attended high school and her parents live now? What does it mean not to be able to walk and touch and see the physical locations you associate with your oldest memories? To have no casual, everyday relationships, outside family, that predate the 1990s?

You see how I overthink these things. I'm a historian, you see.

Now the decent thing for the people and places of Webster Groves, Missouri to have done was to absolutely freeze in time. Like a perpetual shrine to my childhood memories. So that if I did go back, everyone and everything would be the same. But this didn't happen.

Not only does Webster Groves, Missouri continue to exist, it has a disquieting visibility for what is really just a very average suburb of St. Louis. It shows up all the time. I can think of many examples, but I'll share one here.

Apparently the novelist Jonathan Franzen is from Webster Groves, and writes about it in his famous novel The Corrections. I know this not because I am especially up to date on best-selling novels of the past ten years. I have not read The Corrections. I know this because I read it in an essay, "How I Got Jonathan Franzen To Stop Stealing Things From My Brain," by Sara Crosby, in my husband's Believer magazine.

In this essay, Crosby tells us that she, a struggling nonfiction writer, is also from Webster Groves. At a low point in her own career, she becomes frustrated that successful Franzen writes about the Webster Groves she knows, drawing upon places and cultural idiosyncrasies she also remembers, effectively "stealing" her own best and most personal material. His description of pulling pranks at the flagpole at Webster Groves High School in the 1970s gives her a shock of recognition:

I not only knew the flagpole and the entrance’s concrete columns and faded nuclear-fallout-shelter sign, but I also
knew plenty of prankster kids like Franzen in my 1994 graduating class—tall, lanky boys with easy, toothy laughs who
usually took Advanced Physics with Mr. Wojak.

Eventually she comes to her senses, has some professional success of her own, and no longer finds Franzen as threatening.

Which is fine, and great for her.

Except for what she's describing feeling when she reads Jonathan Franzen? I feel it reading Sara Crosby. Except for she and Franzen, their memories share only space in common. Sara Crosby and me, our memories share time.

Not only do I know her Webster Groves, I know HER. Had I never moved, I would have been in that 1994 graduating class with her. I went to first grade with her at Steger Elementary School. I can picture her face in my mind's eye. She was the first kid I knew whose parents got divorced, and I remember feeling sorry for her. Later, in junior high, I remember being scared of her. She was sullen and smartass.

She talks about one of her oldest friends, Peter, and I know exactly who she is talking about. I remember what he looked like in first grade, and that he dressed up like a St. Louis Cardinal for Halloween, but came late to the school that day because he was sick. And I know that he really must be one of her oldest friends because they knew each other back then. And I know that because I WAS THERE.

This might not be as mind-bending to others as it is to me. But that's why I have my little blog without readers.

I have no memory of Sara Crosby ever being a writer. It's not especially surprising that she is one, since it often happens to sullen smartasses. And people do tend to take up different life courses after age thirteen, or maybe she was already an accomplished writer when I moved and I just don't remember that about her.

It is unspeakably strange to discover a childhood memory, someone you never thought about after 1990, suddenly an intelligent and introspective adult writing about a past you have, at least to some degree, in common.

(Sara Crosby even taught me something about my past that I did not know. Apparently telling a joke in order to get candy while trick-or-treating was something unique to Webster Groves. I remember doing this, and have never been aware since that it wasn't the same everywhere. I suppose I never discovered this because after I left Webster Groves, I was thirteen, and I never really trick or treated again. For me, Webster Groves = everything before 1990 = childhood.)