UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

NEW SPECIMENS OLD SPECIMENS THE SCIENTIST MY LOG CONTACT ME
2003-03-01 - 5:58 p.m.

This one�s for Dr. Road, who pointed me down memory lane this morning.

A WONDER LIKE THAT

Once upon a time, long ago when I was young (I was going to say �when I was small� but Dr. Road and a few other readers probably would point out that I am still small), I lived in a very flat town. My one-story house, like most of the other one-story houses in town, was built on reclaimed swampland. My one-story house looked like many other one-story houses in town. It seemed that the houses in town had only three floor plans�and we knew them all. My house was so like the other houses that it couldn�t be cool. But the dirt from digging basements in town, or at least what they did with the dirt, was cool. It was the coolest thing from my childhood.

The librarians I met in my childhood thought what they did with the dirt was cool and librarians are a difficult bunch to impress. The only other thing I knew of in my childhood that impressed them was that they knew of the stories my great-uncle Harold Courlander wrote�and that did not seem to impress them as much.

I figured anything that impressed librarians was important. After all, the librarians at the town library were so smart that they could tell many kids which elementary school they went to. (Although I did not realize it at the time, they could tell those who, like me, went to Dewey School because we were inclined to come into the library and express surprise that the town library used the Dewey decimal system too. We assumed it was called the Dewey decimal system because it was used in Dewey School.)

But even without the librarians I would have been impressed. Our landmark, our coolest thing, impressed a publisher enough to publish a book about it. I still remember the book. I read it and had it read to me. It had a red cover and I later learned that many beginning readers across the country read it. The book was called �The Hill that Grew.� It explained, in fictional terms, how the dirt from all those basements, all dug in the 1950s was piled in one corner of our park, the beloved park with the amusing name, the Oak Park Park, and became a hill. It became a hill higher than the houses around it and that hill became our town�s pride and claim to fame.

That hill (which apparently was named �Hamilton Hill� although I never knew it) was one of the wonders of my childhood. Back then, the �Big Woods� at the park were big enough that getting lost was a worry and the hill was a mountain against the flatness of the surrounding land. We climbed that hill, ran down that hill, sledded down that hill, and, in the case of my youngest sister, hit a pole in the out-of-bounds area and then a tree, resulting in a trip to the emergency room and a small scar.

Part of the wonder of the hill was its promise of interesting places. The hill, by itself, was interesting. But if this hill was what a hill looked like, what might a mountain be? I wanted to see one to find out (and I eventually did: first the Catskills, then the heights of the Rockies.) The other part was its demonstration of how humans could change the landscape around them. If they could create this magnificent hill, what else could they create?

Perhaps the hill was a metaphor for its time. If you want it, we can build it. Swamp, let�s drain it. Hill, let�s create it. What does your suburb lack and how can we supply it? Yet I miss the optimist of that hill. That hill said to its children, �You matter.�

Yes, the hill was cool�cooler than anything in towns around and cooler than the basement dirt from which it sprang. A town could do a lot worse than to give its kids a wonder like that.

LAST YEAR: Taking Snow Personally

LAST FIVE ENTRIES:

Laughter
Sad Day in the Neighborhood
Out to Get Me
Ah Ha!
Bath Salts

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