The Square in Marietta: Far Enough

My takeaway from weeks in England, France, Italy, and Quebec is that other people live differently. We Americans take fast lanes to fast food on the way to consume the next entertainment.  The Old World way is to slow down, enjoy time with your family, get to know a place and its people.  That's what the Square in Marietta, Georgia, is for.

Twenty years ago today, my brother took this photo of his wife and children with me on "the Square," Marietta, Georgia.  I was on break from the school in Mississippi where I'd taught happily for 17 years.  At age 38, I had just determined to rejoin my family in the Atlanta area, to enjoy Mom and Dad's last healthy decade or two, and to be there when they'd need me;  to see my sister and brother-in-law; and to be the indulgent uncle nearby for the sibling niece and nephew (my "niblings").  At the moment of this picture, charmed by the breakfast cafe, the fountain, the park, the antebellum buildings, I had also decided to live somewhere near the Square. 

Plans change.  Only my sister and her husband are as they were then.  In just a year, my brother had moved his family a couple of hours south, then a couple of hours even farther south; Mom and Dad moved around 2005 to be near the grand kids.  Dad died in 2010; Mom came back up in 2012 to be around old friends, just as her memory of them slipped away.

In some ways, I'm not yet fitting into Marietta. Twenty years after I moved to the area, I still get lost.  Streets change their names (Roswell Street becomes South Park before it becomes Whitlock Avenue, all in sight of the Square, and then it morphs into Dallas Highway). No major streets go in straight lines, all routed around untouchable properties -- Lockheed plane factory, Dobbins Air Force Base, and a Civil War Battlefield Park with its nature trails through woods and meadows.  We call Highway 120 our "loop" in an aspirational way, as it isn't close to being circular, and it intersects itself.   I'm not sure where the sprawling town ends and surrounding towns of Kennesaw, Smyrna, Sandy Springs, Powder Springs, Dallas, and Hiram begin.  I'm pretty sure that "Marietta" encompasses one or two dozen "centers" of each type: medical, big box shopping, retirement, and sports -- including the new nationally known Suntrust Stadium.   We have a couple of performing arts centers, including a gorgeous home for the Atlanta Opera.

But the Square is one center with no duplicate, and all roads leading there now have newly-widened sidewalks lined with attractive brick, retro streetlamps with super-bright LED bulbs and safe crosswalks.  The closer one gets to the Square, the more houses one sees that are designated "historic," or else they're newly built in the style of the old ones.

 
[Above is a collage of personal images from the past year (clockwise from upper left):  Mom and Sassy at one of numerous cafes on Marietta's newly widened sidewalk; my buddy Jason's photo of me at the excavation where the scion of an old Marietta family wants an office building to tower over the square, and the city won't let him build it; my friend Susan's photo of me during one of our summer evenings at Shillings, a pub that used to be the hardware store; and Mom and Sassy again.]

Retro isn't an affectation; Marietta does have a history. From the Confederate Cemetery to the Gone With The Wind museum, from the railroads to the B-29 bomber that beat the Axis, from the infamous lynching of Leo Frank to the filming of Oprah's recent movie about Martin Luther King, Jr.   There's a restoration of the home of William Root, who helped build my church St. James Episcopal in 1847. (See photo above: North Park Avenue from the west end, and a shot of the same avenue from the east end, Strand Theatre the identifiable landmark in each view). 

My friends Susan and Suzanne, with whom I've spent dozens of great hours on the Square, both love to travel.  I'm surprised to find that the urge to fly away, once so strong in me, has totally disappeared. Suppose I go to some distant land: what's there to do, but take walks during the day, and, at evening, seek a clean, well-lighted place to have a cocktail, hear music, and read?

I can do all that right here.  The town sponsors concerts, "art walks," a winter skate park, annual art fairs, and weekly farmers' market.  (Below, clockwise from upper left: the Square, the fountain, national artists gathered at the annual "Chalktoberfest"; an aerial view looking west, with Kennesaw Mountain in the distance).  

Ten minutes away from the Square in my suburban subdivision, located on the edge of a Civil War battlefield, I still don't know my neighbors.  I'm the only person I ever see on our streets, as I walk my lovely Mia.

But the Square is always crowded with people of all ages; hair colors natural, tinted, or bald; bodies fat or fit; walking children or walking dogs; black, white, Hispanic, Asian. or Middle Eastern of descent.  For food, there's French, Italian, Mexican-Japanese fusion, Thai, "pub," gourmet Southern, Australian, Arabian, and pizza.  There are churches, Lord knows.  And every hour, late into the night, there's one of the trains that put this town on the map. Alongside the tracks, a new walkway-bike way passes from Kennesaw Mountain to the bike trail that I ride every day in summer, and (eventually) Atlanta, and eventually, to the east coast.  

Far enough.