Nature’s Half Acre
by George Bilgere

Many years ago, when I was a child, my father took me to the theater to see a Walt Disney movie called Nature’s Half Acre. The movie depicted the lives of the many small and medium-sized creatures living in a bog-like area in a woods somewhere. Even though the area was very small, there was a whole, thriving community of frogs, crickets, water bugs, water snakes, herons, grebes, woodfinches, raccoons, possums, deer, voles, owls, foxes, and deer. They all knew each other, and they lived companionably together among the reeds and the trees and the bushes. And they all seemed to like each other, although occasionally they ate each other. It was nothing personal, though. That was just the way things were in Nature’s Half Acre.

When I came to Cleveland in the early nineties I found my own little Nature’s Half Acre, where the ecosystems of University Heights and Shaker Heights intersect at the shopping center on Fairmount Circle. There was a little bar and restaurant called Norton’s, where students and faculty could eat dinner or meet for beers. There was a travel agency called Travel World, and a very nice woman named Sharon planned all my trips for me. There was a drugstore called Campus Drug, and the only people who worked there were old women, some of them well over a hundred years in age, who moved around the dim interior like turtles in some undersea grotto, and they all took the time to learn my name as I stood in line interminably with the other customers as the ancient women attempted to work the cash registers.

There was a little deli called Shaker Deli, but everyone called it Bella’s, because of the jolly and very plump European woman of mysterious origins who more or less ran the place. She was perhaps even more than plump, she had an incomprehensible accent, and it was impossible to imagine a time when she was truly “bella.” She called everyone honey, and she would browbeat anyone who entered the store into buying day old pastries for a dollar. She sold enormous, astonishing pickles. Sometimes when I walked by on a winter day I saw her staring out the window into the distance of Cleveland, and I wondered if she was thinking of her native Romania or Bulgaria or Albania, dreaming of herself as a young maiden running barefoot through the flowery meadows along the fjord, pursued by ardent young shepherds, or perhaps by the KGB.

And nearby was a bank, and all the tellers knew your name, and Bella knew the people at the bank, and the people at the bank knew the people at the hair salon, and the people at the hair salon knew the people at Norton’s, who knew the people at Travel World. Nature’s Half Acre.

But things change very quickly in this country. Now Norton’s has become Pizzazz. Travel World, devastated by 9/11, has become a coffee shop, part of a Cleveland chain of coffee shops, and no one there knows your name. Bella’s old world deli disappeared one night and emerged as an elegant little take out place for upscale locals, who leave their SUV’s idling at the curb as they run in to buy designer lasagna at ten dollars a pound. Campus Drug has been replaced, like almost everything else in his country, by an acronym. It’s called CVS, and it’s identical to a million other CVS stores dotting the nation.

And a few months ago the center of this little ecosystem, its sustaining pillar, vanished. When I came here it was called Russo’s. By American standards it was a microscopically small supermarket. Hardly even super. Compared to the nearest Finast, which is larger than the Superdome, or the nearest Heinen’s, which is about the size of Brown’s stadium, it was barely noticeable. But it was close, within walking distance, and it was cozy and intimate, and after I’d lived here for a few months I started recognizing people from the community, and we’d chat over the frozen foods, we’d get to know each other in front of the wine racks, we’d gossip about the neighborhood as we waited for the butcher. Maybe it’s because Americans are now so physically enormous that the store was deemed too small. Maybe it couldn’t compete with the new Tops market down the way, where you can enjoy the experience Americans seem to prefer over any other—that is, shopping in total anonymity, without the danger of ever seeing anyone you know, as if it were all happening on television—which, of course, it is, as the omnipresent surveillance cameras follow your every move.

Perhaps it will be replaced by an Urban Outfitters store, or a Jenny Craig’s Weight Loss Clinic. Maybe it will become a Wal-Mart. In any case, it will mean the end the last remnant of the community I knew here fifteen years ago.

America doesn’t like old things. We thrive on the new. The moment something becomes old we tear it down, we build something newer and cheaper, we erect a bright, corporate logo. We are a country without monuments, a place without a past.

And I, who witnessed that change, who reported to you today that a whole world, a whole community, disappeared in only a decade—well, I too am an American, and soon I will leave here to live and work elsewhere. I will join the rest of the country, a country of drifters constantly on the move, never at rest, always searching for something like home.
from Cool Cleveland contributor George Bilgere gbilgere@jcu.edu

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