| Butler Pennsylvania 1 Setting Foot When I was a boy my compass said: Main Street points North where parades come from marching up to the Court House, and Brady Street points West along the route the circus takes from the train yard to the fairgrounds. Where those lines crossed my world opened up expanded to the edge of town and the woods beyond, coordinates between which I staked out and claimed utopia as my own lived in it, that time-free state, then growing self-reliant, left— forgetting what I had until some yearning unstillable drew me back to where the lines crossed and I returned to the Eden that once was knowing I could never find but would live within its bounds with the boy in me who had known and seen so I would hope and believe and await the gate to open to an Eden grander yet than the one that I once had in those guileless boyhood days, in that first beguiling taste. Next Home |
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