So here I am in Centralville an area in Lowell, Massachusetts where Jack Kerouac was born and spent the early years of his life. This was yesterday, the temperature was about minus ten degrees centigrade - hence the scarf! It's colder today.
After a leisurely breakfast with my hosts, retired priest Frank Baker and his daughter Cindy, I headed out on one of my favourite activities in a new town or city - especially if it is of a "pilgrimage" nature - a walking tour. Simply walking around through the streets, these same streets Jack walked, seeing the places he lived and worked and played. Much has no doubt changed, but I am sure much still remains the same - especially under a blanket of snow. Many of the houses are the same, the Merrimack and Concord Rivers continue to flow very much as very have always done, many of the old textile mills are still here even though the industry has gone - many have been turned into luxury apartments, or incorporated into the country's first and (I think) only urban national park, complete with park rangers (!), some of the old mills remain as derelict redbrick ruins waiting for redevelopment and rebirth. Much changed, much remains the same. No doubt the snake of the world still lies coiled beneath the hill behind me here in Centralville (read
Doctor Sax to know what I'm talking about).
I took a lot of pictures - no room to show them all here but if you are a facebook friend you can see them there - I'll just put in a selection here to give you a flavour. Here's Kerouac's birthplace at 9 Lupine Road where he lived the first two years of his life (incidently, if you click on any of the pictures you can see them full-size).
Gabrielle & Leo Kerouac lived on the second floor (first floor for Brits) with their children Gerard, Caroline and baby Jack. In 1924 they moved just around the corner to 35 Burnaby Street (never noticed the BC connection before!) into what for me I think was my favourite Kerouac childhood home. As you can see, the sky was very blue yesterday. Gorgeous day!
The Kerouacs moved around quite a lot, as you can gather, and I visited a number of other addresses in Centralville, including 34 Beaulieau Street where Jack's saintly older brother Gerard died in 1926 at the age of nine (Jack was four). Then I headed over to Pawtucketville, maybe 10-15 minutes walk away, where Jack spent his teenage years, again at various addresses. From Pawtucketville you can head into downtown across the Moody Street Bridge - this became a fearful place for young Jack who, at the age of twelve, was walking across the bridge with his mother when a man coming towards them, carrying a watermelon, suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. I can well imagine the terror as even now the car tires rolling across the iron grid of the bridge seem to wail mournful cries of tormented ghosts.
From this mournful location it was fitting that I then took in the Archambault Funeral Home where Pauvre Ti Jean was laid out before his funeral on October 24, 1969 at Saint Jean-Baptiste Church, which I passed on my way down to the Old Worthen Pub (a Kerouac local) to hook up with my old friend Ed Farley, who I first met in Louisville, Kentucky through the Thomas Merton Society. Ed was born in Lowell and has lived here virtually all his life.
With Ed I visited the Kerouac Monument at the corner of Bridge and French Streets - a simple but impressive community of solitary granite blocks inscribed with some choice words of Kerouac scripture. Ed was there at the inauguration of this monument and remembers the architect inviting people to come back in a quiet moment, to sit and to read some of Kerouac's writing in this very peaceful place - in the midst of the city and the old textile mill buildings.
Today I have spent most of the day in downtown Lowell, first at the Kerouac Monument again, which I find has a deep solidity to it, as well as a deep spirituality - a sense of never mind the legend, never mind the tragedy, never mind all the confusion and dissolution, read these words and find in them the life of a great soul - and let it be balm and sustenance for your own soul. Then, I headed over to the public library, one of Jack's favourite places when skipping classes at Lowell High, which I passed along the way - stopping at the famous clock featured in
Maggie Cassidy. There's something quite ironic and wonderfully subterranean to skip classes in order to go and sit in a
library! But with temperatures like today's, I can well imagine why.
It was getting dark by the time I left the library. Time to stop off at the local bookstore to pick up a couple of books on the social history of this place, Lowell; and then a brisk wander through the gathering gloom to visit a couple more haunts of old angel midnight himself, before repairing to the Old Worthen once more for a pint of Sam Adams before heading back for supper. As I ordered my pint, a fellow patron of the establishment asked me where my accent was from... and what brought me to Lowell, and in the best Kerouac fashion a conversation was begun and a connection made - ending up with Eric insisting on paying my bill. Thank you, Eric - blessings upon you, and upon you too, Scott - it was good to meet you both!
"We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move. And we moved!" - On the Road. As Jack & Neal did 60 years ago, we entered the Lincoln Tunnel and emerged on the Jersey side taking the mysterious sign that pointed "South" with an arrow on Route 1, heading for Trenton then Philadelphia, then on down into Maryland heading for Fells Point in Baltimore, birthplace of Billie Holiday and location of erstwhile TV series "Homicide: Life on the Street" - a site of pilgrimage in itself!
Most of the way we were listening to local radio stations, first jazz from New York City - celebrating the career of drummer Roy Haines giving us a funky seventies soundtrack as we made our way across the Brooklyn Bridge once more and through Manhattan to the tunnel; then picking up a Philadelphia station playing oldies from the sixties, seventies and eighties - lots more soul there including "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" by Sly and the Family Stone; 
then later still as we got down into Maryland listening to NPR, including a speech by President-elect Obama made today in Baltimore where we were headed ... also listening with new ears to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech from 1963. Lots of comment and discussion on the airwaves about today, Martin Luther King Day in the U.S. and tomorrow, the inauguration of the first African-American President. Like a dream come true.
