Setting is character? Setting as character? Setting makes character?

Here’s where my head has been the last few days: setting as character.  I googled that phrase to validate and reinforce what I already knew. 

"It's a reflection of the characters. It acts on the characters. It provides an almost inexhaustible source of details that can help you tell your story more vividly or give you an entirely new set of ideas." (absolutewrite.com)

"Bharti (Kirchner)says that you know you've achieved it if you take the story and set it in a another city and then examine it. Is it the same story? If the story no longer works, then you know you've made setting a character." (navigatingtheslushpile.blogspot.com)

"Setting can actually serve a dual role in that it can be not only the backdrop for your story, but it can also serve characterization through symbol." (warriorwriters.wordpress.com)

Why am I stuck on setting as character? Because my setting, my hometown, makes me crazy. I love it. I hate it. I wish I could move far away, yet when I think about the nuts and bolts of everyday life, I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I think, “What kind of writer can I hope to become if I can’t see even that much?” Then my brain shouts back that Emily Dickinson never lived anywhere but Amherst and maybe I’m selling myself short and it’s not my location holding me back. Maybe my limitations are self-imposed. Ouch.

  

Here are some notes on setting that have been bubbling inside me the last week or so. 

For two decades, I’ve been driving the same four-mile route to and from work: mostly quiet streets, two traffic lights, one rotary. One day last week, one of the quietest, prettiest streets was lined with rattling television news trucks chugging exhaust, rude spewing critters. Satellite dishes bloomed on spiky towers, cables slithered everywhere. No one cared that we drivers were trying to move from one end of the road to the other. All eyes were focused on a squat beige duplex with a No Trespassing sign nailed to the deck off the side yard. 

The most recent renter of the back apartment had just that day been sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. He is a child pornographer and a child molester/cannibal in training. There’s a torture chamber in the cellar of that little house, a home I never thought twice about in the 10,000 times I’ve driven past it and the thousand or more times I’ve run by it. But I know others on the street. The house one down is a pretty brick mini-mansion I once fantasized about owning. The house across the street is home to a teacher I know. A gym friend lives four lots away. My daughter’s viola instructor’s house, wide shingled porch with rhododendrons all about, is just over the hill. 

I don’t know where this guy came from or how he got to be who he is. That’s one thing I noticed in the stories. No one was quoted saying, “I knew so and so back in high school when we were in the senior play together.” Or, “He used to pick his nose in fourth grade.”  No reference to a childhood, no history, in my city at least, which is a city where we greet each other by playing our local version of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game: Where did you go to high school? Did your uncle live on Vernon Hill? Did your parents own that grocery store on Grafton Street? Did you go to Holy Name or St. Peter’s? Ever been to Moynihan’s?

Here’s what I mean. I walk into a local restaurant where I’m meeting my parents for dinner. I don’t walk into the restaurant and describe what my parents look like. Cindy the hostess greets me by name and asks how I’m doing and before I can get a word out starts leading me to my parents, talking the whole time about her summer – she spent a lot of time down the Cape -- and asking about mine. Our kids went to school together. She and I used to work together.  We’ve known each other over a generation, but we haven’t seen each other since June so we have a lot of catching up to do, which we do with my mom and dad joining in too, until Cindy gets called back to work. 

A day later, I’m at the gym and I need to get a balance ball from off the rack. There’s an older gent in the way, arranging his glasses, so I need to wait a few seconds. He moves slowly. His fingers tremble. He hangs the glasses from a thin PVC pipe, then changes his mind and places them on a shelf. He’s wearing a T-shirt from my college, the T-shirt every alum gets for attending the reunions.  

He finally notices me and apologizes for being in the way. I shake my head. He’s not inconveniencing me. His shoulders are stooped. He’s thin and about my height. I notice his blue eyes are watery and faded almost to grey, like my dad’s. 

“What year did you graduate?” I point to his shirt and tell him my year. 

He smiles at me. “Was supposed to be ’47 but ’49 because of the war.”

I wondered if he knew my dad, who didn’t go to the same school but is near enough in age. So I ask where he went to high school. The answer is not my dad’s high school but we continue talking. He went to St. Stephen’s until grade eight, and so did my dad. 

No he doesn’t know my dad but he asks if I’m related to a guy who happens to be my uncle Arthur who passed away twenty years ago. That means he knows my mother too. We talk about my family. We talk about our hills, Vernon and Grafton. We talk a little about college. 

I say I’m seeing my parents later that day and could I ask his name so I can tell my mom he said hi. Turns out the gent I’ve been talking with for fifteen minutes now is my old pediatrician. 

“Do you remember me? I had braids? I was fat?” 

He shakes his head no. He laughs and says he was fat back then too.

When we finally finish talking, I go to the mats to do some weights and the doctor returns to his workout. Out of the corner of my eye I watch him do wall push-ups and stretches. I remember I was never afraid of going to see Dr. R. He was a gentle man. He was also the fattest man I’d ever seen. I remember he wore white shirts and black ties. He smoked. 

The doctor started to leave and the guy at the other end of the mats stops him. He says he couldn’t help but overhear our conversation. 

“You were my pediatrician too,” he says. “You remember me?”

The doctor grins and taps his head and says something about old age and forgetting. 

The guy says he doubts the issue is forgetfulness or age. He’s sixty now, so he’s changed quite a bit since the last time Dr. R saw him. Plus, he didn’t have the full beard back then. 

When I go visit my parents that night I tell them I met Dr. R. I say I almost told him the story of the prescription. My mother frowns and asks what I mean. When I explain, she corrects my story.

It didn’t involve him at all, she says. It didn't involve prescriptions. It was about over-the-counter vitamins. 

I was two. We were snowed in -- nor'easter. We lived halfway down a steep street, on the second floor of a three-decker on Vernon Hill. Even in good weather, the street was treacherous. My mother had run out of cigarettes, Kent 100s. I remember the carton, glossy white with gold trim, because once I was old enough to walk the four blocks to the store by myself – I was probably five – I was sent out for cigarettes once a week or more.

  

I imagine windows shaking in their frames. Snow is piling up outside, making streets and sidewalks impassible. There’s no way she can get out. In a panic, my mother called our neighborhood drug store, Oscar’s. She explained her dilemma: the baby, her one and only precious child, needed her vitamins. Could someone please deliver them? 

The owner’s son explained he was the only one in the store. Plus, the weather was awful. My mother begged. She probably said I was sick. Or that I was cranky. I don’t really know. The story changes a bit each time she tells it. Finally, she broke him down and he agreed to close the store and trudge through heavy snow and gale winds so that I could have my vitamins. 

Next comes the punchline: "And as long as you’re coming, could you bring me a carton of cigarettes too? Thank you so much."

My mother always cackles when she gets to that part. She's quite the character. So is my city.