“A sense of life”
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
The Baker neighborhood makes a brief but memorable cameo in Kent Haruf’s 1990 novel Where You Once Belonged (Random House):
It was early evening then. It was in the fall of the year and the trees standing up in front of the old houses in the neighborhood were just beginning to turn. The apartment they had rented was in an old established area of Denver. Formerly it must have been an attractive part of town; there were many large brick houses, built before the turn of the century, but the houses were nearly all divided into apartments and the streets were lined with cars. We walked five or six blocks south along Bannock Street and then turned west where we could see the mountains, high and blue-looking out beyond the city, and then north, and then east again to make a circle. It felt good to be walking. It was pleasantly cool outside and we saw a number of Hispanic families sitting out on the big porches of the neighborhood houses, playing music and drinking beer and talking, while handsome little black-haired kids played games in the yards or rode bicycles on the sidewalks, and I thought there was a sense of life in the neighborhood, of things happening which would be interesting to know about.
According to the book’s timeline, Haruf is describing what Baker would’ve been like in the early 1980s.
The jacket indicates that Haruf (who also wrote the acclaimed Plainsong) divides his time between Illinois, where he teaches English, and Colorado. It doesn’t specify exactly where in Colorado, but judging by this passage, he seems to have developed a good sense of the neighborhood.
