Not For Sitting

Clinton Township, New Jersey is a collection of towns and boroughs which center around the town of Clinton. Clinton is known probably for several things, but I would assume the most recognizable thing in town is the Red Mill which sits on the South Branch of the Raritan River. It is directly across the river from the Stone Mill. Both mills are now museums and are frequent field trip locations for the children at the local schools which I know because I grew up in Clinton Township and was a regular at both of the mills throughout my school career.

Not my photo, this was lovingly ripped off from the internet.

The Red Mill in particular stands out to me as a landmark of my youth. There were the aforementioned field trips. In middle school I started attending the Haunted Mill in October, when the whole Red Mill was transformed into a massive haunted house. In high school my theater troupe performed plays of fairy tales in tents constructed on concrete slabs behind the Red Mill during Dickens Days. (I never figured out why it was called Dickens Days, but it was around the start of the holiday season and it was very cold in the tents, I can tell you that much.)

There are so many lovely memories of time spent in downtown Clinton. Meals at restaurants with various family, coffee outings with my boyfriend at the time, wandering around shopping with friends. Even though I never lived in the town proper, Clinton does feel like my hometown. And while I haven’t lived out there in over 15 years, going back is always familiar, like re-watching a classic movie. But for all the pleasant associations I have with the town, every time I go back there I do so with the absolute dread of bumping into someone I knew in middle or high school.

My preteen and teenaged years were not my best, as is probably true for a lot of people. In particular middle school was rough and while high school was much better, the groundwork laid during 6th through 8th grade made for some unpleasant relationships with people through high school. The long and the short of it is this: I was overweight. I wasn’t cool or popular. And a few select people liked to remind me of those facts every single freaking time I saw them. (Somehow at least one of them always ended up in my gym class, which is part of why I firmly believe that hell is an eternal public school gym class where it’s always the day of the Presidential Fitness test.) Really it was nothing too horrible, but words stick with you and I’m certain that things said to and about me during middle and high school are a large part of why I’m so mean to myself in my own head.

This year makes 20 years since I graduated from high school and honestly I think I’ve forgotten more of the hurtful things than I remember. With a few notable exceptions, I do not recall who said what and when, who really hurt my feelings or embarrassed me in front of a whole class. It’s water under the bridge, mostly. I’m quite secure in who I am as an adult. If people choose to criticize or make fun of me now, I don’t really care. I understand that their behavior has far more to do with whatever is going on with them than it does with me. But what I haven’t forgotten is that feeling in the pit of my stomach, the twinge of pain in the chest that I would feel back then. The embarrassment and the shame of being the one singled out in a crowd to be picked on. I fear bumping into someone from high school because I’m quite sure that upon seeing them all of those feelings will come rushing back and I will feel fifteen again.

None of this stops me from going back to Clinton. As I said, it is my hometown. I have family and friends who live nearby so I’m out there fairly regularly. I don’t always go downtown, but usually if I do it is to see my uncle play during the live music events that Clinton hosts on Friday nights through the summer. My uncle, Phil Swanson, is a singer songwriter and has been performing all around New Jersey at similar events for years. You can check him out on Spotify, here.

You should click that link.

Do it now.

I’ll wait.

He’s good, right? I know! Tell your friends.

Several years ago, pre-pandemic, my sister was visiting New Jersey and Uncle Phil was playing in Clinton. We ventured on down and walked around town until we found the spot where he was set up. Directly in front of him was an empty wooden bench. This was odd, considering Main Street was quite crowded and there was no open seating anywhere else that we could see. Figuring it was just fortuitous timing, Meredith and I took a seat on the bench. We couldn’t have been there for two minutes before the whole thing collapsed under us and we both fell to the ground.

Let me tell you, people, I have been overweight for the majority of my life. I have tried to squeeze into countless items of clothing that don’t fit. I have pretended to have fun shopping with friends in stores that don’t sell my size. I have self-consciously pulled my shirt away from my stomach repeatedly for decades in an attempt to prevent the general public from seeing fat bulges and rolls. But I tell you now that nothing in my life has made me feel more fat than collapsing a whole ass park bench.

As it turns out the bench had been empty when we arrived because it was unsteady. The people who had been sitting there before got up and moved because they thought it might collapse. So it wasn’t my colossal butt that broke it, that bench was going to collapse in the next stiff breeze. We laughed it off, but I left that evening with that familiar twinge of shame in my chest and the nagging fear of “what if someone from high school saw that happen?”

This past Friday my aunt, cousin, and I went to hear Uncle Phil play in Clinton again. Once again there was a bench positioned directly in front of where he was set up, but this time the bench was metal. I was pretty confident that even my butt was no match for a metal bench, so I took a seat next to my aunt and cousin. We were quite comfortable for about twenty minutes or so when suddenly, between songs, we felt something shift in the bench below us and heard a cracking noise. We leapt up to find that the slats were rusting away from the sides of the bench and the middle of the seat had started to fall downward. The bench did not actually break or collapse; in fact my aunt was able to sit on it for the rest of the evening and nothing else happened. But there was no way that I was sitting back down and risk collapsing yet another seating apparatus in the town where I feel imminent ridicule around every corner.

After standing for a while my cousin Abigail and I took seats on a couple of metal chairs a little bit down the way and listened to the rest of the set from there. As we stood up to leave and passed the rickety bench again I said something about being traumatized from sitting on benches in the town of Clinton. Abigail laughed and said, “Clinton is not for sitting.”

I could not agree more. For all the memories of embarrassment or bad feelings that I have associated with Clinton and my fellow classmates, I won’t stop going back there. I like the familiarity, I like that I know the shortcuts and sneaky back roads. I like that walking across the bridge over the river brings back many happy memories. But Clinton is not for sitting, not for me. I enjoy that town while in motion, forever keeping an eye out behind me for a familiar face from high school, always ready to dash around a corner to avoid confronting that nasty feeling of ridicule that I managed to escape from twenty years ago.

I like where I’m from, but I’m so glad I don’t live there any more. The benches really suck.