2017 Reading Challenge discussion

A "hometown" is not something I'm sure I have. I found a few definitions of the term. "The place in which a person was born": Akron qualifies. "The place in which a person grew up": nope, I don't remember ever living here, although I did live here for two years after I was born and lived nearby for two or three widely separated years afterwards. "The place of one's principal residence": no, again. I've lived within 20 miles of where I now live in Washington state since 1979. But. "The place from which a person comes": yes! I'm one of hundreds of thousands who have, in leaving, helped return Akron, in 2010, to slightly less than its 1920 population (199,110 in 2010, 208,435 in 1920, with a high of 290,351 in 1960).

David Giffels fills us in on what's happened since we left. "I stay in a place that other people leave", he notes in an essay on bowling, a sport that Akron organised by inventing the Professional Bowlers Association in 1958. The PBA, not unlike me, decamped to Seattle in 2000. I just googled it and found that its current address is in Chicago. Maybe it followed Boeing there.

Giffels also writes about "hamburgers and ice cream and ..rock music and soap-box racers and Chuck Taylors and football", all with more or less robust ties to the Rubber Capital of the World. The essays were an affectionate introduction for me to the hometown I never knew.

16 out of 50/52.

I understand your difficulty with this part of the list. I was also born in Akron, but I haven't been there since I was three years old. I have no memories of the town of my birth, only the tales of family members.

I suppose in a way we're like the children of first generation imigrants. We are only tied to the place by happenstance and memories which are not our own. So why is the sense of connection so strong?