"Jerusalem, My Happy Home"

Appalachian Tune

Whenever I go back to the little town in Pennsylvania where I grew up, it’s a bittersweet experience for me. I’m not just saying that I miss the beautiful or homely things that used to be there, but aren’t anymore, like the small grocery store, run by an Italian family, where I used to pick up my newspapers to deliver on my paper route, and where I’d sometimes get a small carton of orange juice when I got thirsty on a hot summer day. Sure, there are a lot of things like that — the barber shop where I heard the town’s gossip when I was a boy, not that I understood much of it, or the small pharmacy where I’d buy copies of Peanuts comic books, or the abandoned train trestle behind the ball field, that made it possible for you to cut twenty minutes off a walk across town. I mean even the huge heaps of coal-dust, two or three hundred feet high, that marred the town’s landscape, but that to me were friendly because they were familiar; and now their place knows them no more.

That’s why it’s l…