Hiraeth on Googie Avenue
It arises as a memory cloaked in vapor.
Like all dreams do, surrounded by gasoline mist
and the smell of tires in the August heat.
The chainsaw scream of the two stroke
mixes with the peals of childhood delight,
as they lay righteous go-kart rubber.
Soft-serve chocolate swirl dipped in Magic Shell
for the victor.
This hiraeth on Googie Avenue,
where freshly scrubbed 1960s Greatest Generation
parents, confident victors of the war and the peace
tow children into the promise of tomorrow.
And the moon. And America triumphant.
On Googie Avenue.
There’s a Googie Avenue in Des Moines, Iowa and
Bemidji, Minnesota. There’s one in Los Cruces,
New Mexico, and one in your town.
You know it.
An avenue of consumer dreams for the newly ennobled middle class,
fully prosperous in the Keynesian model of the postwar economy.
Neon signs point the way.
To Zayre’s for shoes, the noble gas
bent into crimson cursive,
buzzing above the doors with the promise of Keds
and tube socks by the dozen.
And after, take the kids for McDonald’s, arches spitting yellow neon
into the sky, Arby’s for the adults, a cowboy hat outlined
in flickering red incandescence.
Then to IGA for food shopping, the departments glazed
in red neon for meats, green neon for produce,
items spin by the checker into paper bags
for the wayback of the Ford Country Squire.
Dad finishes his Winston and decides on Bonanza.
The windows of the Country Squire magnifying the bright woodfire
sign, pumping up the colors like a hallucinogen.
The sweat of the steak sear in white flicker.
The flames under the wood, orange and cozy.
Dad has his fill with money to spare, and thinks he might sleep it off at the Holiday Inn.
The 50 foot blinking yellow arrow topped with the star points the way.
It was all on Googie Avenue.
Googie Avenue is the best and brightest.
Googie Avenue is the smartest guys in the room.
Googie Avenue is gonna win the war in Vietnam.
Googie Avenue is gonna build the Great Society.
Googie Avenue is gonna wipe out poverty.
Googie Avenue is gonna end hunger.
Googie Avenue is gonna contain communism.
Googie Avenue is gonna Freedom Ride.
Googie Avenue is gonna take us to the moon.
Googie Avenue didn’t think about OPEC.
Googie Avenue didn’t think we’d elect Nixon.
Googie Avenue didn’t think about inflation.
Googie Avenue hurt the 444 days they were in Tehran.
Googie Avenue saw all the money go to Wall Street.
Dad’s job went to Mexico.
Dad lost the mortgage and got a divorce.
Bonanza shut down and the Winstons gave him lung cancer.
The neon signs came down. One by one.
They were unsightly, people said. An eyesore.
So garish and assaultive to the senses.
Light pollution, they said.
We should be looking at the stars.
We should be looking at the moon.
Googie Avenue crept into the dark with the flicker
of a dying electrical grid, and the hiraeth disappeared.
If it ever existed.
Replaced by a tile flooring store.
I have no photograph. So I stare at the store.
Where I hope with the right kind of vision,
I can make the go-kart palace appear again.
A palimpsest of the eyes.
An image just beyond the windshield.
It shimmers. I smell the gasoline, the heat, the rubber.
But it is only the traffic.
The light turns green, and I turn left on Googie Avenue,
hoping to find the moon.
But all I found were the suburbs.
“Hiraeth On Googie Avenue” originally appeared in Volume 41 of the Northern New England Review.
