AURA

There are a lot of people from Buffalo, mostly because a lot of them left. Rust belt. I haven’t been there in ages. Sine probably knows more about the way it is now than I do, like the battery factory that’s on a little tiny bit of where Bethlehem Steel used to be. We used to roll up the windows in the car because the air around there stunk for miles. I was just a kid then and it was hard to understand why people lived around there, but . . . . That was just when we passed by to go to Rushford Lake for Fourth of July. I hear there are a bunch of windmills in Lake Erie near Lackawanna where the steel plant was. Quite a different scene than I remember with big boats unloading iron ore there. The last thing I remember was some festival on Main Street where so many stores were abandoned. A downtown movie theater where there was nothing left but the front of it. By then I was a teenager, and it made me wonder if they’d had to leave it up to preserve some sense of Main Street to help the remaining merchants. Anyway, that was after a lot of people had moved to the suburbs in the 60’s and 70’s, getting away from the blacks who were moving in. Well, you’ve got to live somewhere, and I hope they’re enjoying our neighborhood. It was on the right side of Main Street, and when I saw it on google maps, things looked pretty familiar, except one of the gutters on our old house was hanging down. That’s the thing: If you haven’t grown up with that kind of stuff you don’t get into keeping it up. I looked at recent stats to round out this note, and people haven’t quit leaving yet, which is to say the population of the city has been decreasing ever since I left, though the population of Erie County that it’s in has been increasing for years. So I guess if they don’t move to Florida or wherever, they’re still going to the suburbs.