A few years back Esquire magazine used to ask famous writers to offer a short piece on why they lived where they lived. Inevitably they all tried to define an ineffable "sense of place," something that helped make them fully three- dimensional people.
I live in Manchester. But I don't live in the Manchester that has just finished building fortresses called Numerica and Indian Head and The Center of New Hampshire. I don't live in the beltway I-293 Manchester that cleaves through the West Side. Nor do I live in the Manchester of a Route 3 that's bristling with the mushrooms of new condos. My Manchester is very different.
I live a few blocks west of Gill Stadium, near an Allegro's and an Amoskeag Bank and a Woolworth's (with a lunch counter) and a state liquor store and a twenty-four hour laundromat. From my porch I can watch the sun set beyond Mt. Uncanoonic, watch it come up over the Felton Brush Company. At five thirty a.m. I hear the delivery trucks for Blake's and the supermarket, and at one-thirty on a Sunday morning I can hear the screech and growl of motorcycles as the local bar kicks everyone home. It is a neighborhood, a certain definable (if boundary-less) state, with character and texture and a spiky phizzog, as Carl Sandburg would say.
Why do I live here, in a three-room apartment on the second floor of a house owned by a barely English-fied French-Canadian widow? Because here it feels like home. And what is home? Home is not the patronizing boarding-house of Robert Frost, where they have to take you in. Home is not a place at all. Home is a way to describe a certain kind of centering and connectedness. Thoreau had it right when he wrote about where he lived: home is "a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake." A sense of home really means one thing: you are not at the mercy or in jeopardy. Home is knowing where the umbilicals attach.
Despite all the boosterism of Mayor Shaw and the Union Leader, and the efforts of developers to make Manchester look like Boston, Manchester's character rests on the fact that it is a city of neighborhoods, a city that still retains a human scale. Each time I do my shopping or deposit my money or watch the aged Salvation Army sergeant stand inside Allegro's angling for people's change, I know that I live in a world that can be known. Each time the woman with her four children pushes her full shopping cart past my house I know I am safe, the squeaking of the overworked wheels an anthem for the place I live.
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