Fifteen Miles Down Memory Lane

It's that time of year again: that time when I get in touch with complete strangers and arrange meetings with them in coffee shops. Once there, we ask each other surface questions and try to get to know one another very quickly.

No, it's not my once-yearly dating experience, it's time to interview prospective Princeton students!

This is one of my favorite volunteer activities, and this year I took full advantage of it by offering to drive and meet each of my interviewees on their own turf. I've lived in Chicago for a year and a half now, and although I'm familiar with more neighborhoods than anyone could have predicted, whole swaths of the city remain a mystery to me. So, over the Martin Luther King Day weekend, I made two trips to the southern suburbs.

The interviews themselves were great experiences--experiences I can't talk about here--and my inaugural visits to Orland Park and Matteson went off without a hitch. There was only one moment that brought me up short, and that was the 15-odd miles I spent on I-57.

It wouldn't surprise many people that the toughest breakup of my life thus far has been with a place. Not least of all because I've talked about it here before. (I even have my own listen-to-Adele-and-cry song dedicated to the experience, which is something all good breakups need.) For the most part, moved on from the loss of my childhood home pretty quickly. I don't feel untethered, or unsafe, as I did initially. Nor do I miss the ability to be on my parents' doorstep in 2.5 hours. (That is to say, I do miss that, but it's not an active source of woe.)

So, for the most part, I'm over it. Just like I'm over my high school crushes and that time smacked a pile of coats during a game of hide and seek and my best friend emerged near tears. That doesn't mean I don't get a twinge now and then, and I definitely got a twinge southbound on I-57.

I went back to work on Tuesday, the feeling largely forgotten. However, perhaps as a result of that brief Monday-morning moment, I found my mind wandering to my hometown. How I have a dentist appointment scheduled there in March, so I'll have to go back. How one of my high school friends just moved back there. How my hometown had been, for some time, pretty much ignored by Google Street View.

On a whim, I typed my old address into Google Maps, and was immediately forced to contain my shout of glee (still at work, remember). My old neighborhood was on Google Street View, and what was that parked in front of our old house?

That's right. Our car. Some time before my parents moved--that late spring/early summer, in fact, because the for sale sign is up and the house has sold--the photography van drove by and did me an immeasurable favor.

I may love their new town, their new house, and my mom's new job. I may no longer yearn for visits to Champaign (although I may never stop yearning for that warm light in the living room). I may be at peace with this new chapter of my life, but that doesn't mean I'm not thrilled--moved to tears, ecstatic--that, in a tiny corner of the internet, my parents are still living in my childhood home.

New Year

It's not really news, per se, but it's--nice isn't really the word--good to see it getting national coverage. Do I think this will change anything? I'm not sure, but I doubt it. Do I want to become the next David Simon? Not really--I don't think I have the constitution for prolonged bouts of anger--but when I see stuff like this (not news to me, but presented like this, off the pages of the middlebrow Chicago Tribune, in a new context) I feel that outraged, liberal, Ivy League, white person frustration coming on, and that's difficult enough to parse on its own. Usually it just turns into sadness, which is far less productive, albeit certainly less hypocritical.

 There are times when I feel ashamed of loving the things I love about Chicago as much as I do, because I know I enjoy them others' expense. (And that feeling, too, is an unwanted luxury.) Once you know something, you can't un-know it. When I hopped in the airport shuttle in Kansas City two days ago, told the driver where I was from, and he said, "Oh, Chicago. That's a great city. Big homicide problem, though," it reminded me of the reactions French people would have when we told them we were from Illinois, "near Chicago." They would inevitably mime a machine gun, and make the machine gun noise. They had gotten their image of Chicago from Al Capone, but were they really that far off base? Certainly not in the nineties, which was when most of those conversations took place. There are fewer homicides now in Chicago than there were then, even with this year's 16% rise, but that is no reason to feel good about ourselves, or the city. To echo President Obama recently, is this really the best we can do?

Kansas City has its own sizable homicide rate, so the guy driving the shuttle would know. To someone from New Orleans or Detroit or Baltimore if we're talking per capita, I probably sound quaint too. But competing for the distinction of Worst National Murder Problem is about as stupid as undergraduates comparing how little sleep they got the night before.

Why am I starting a new year of blogging by talking about this? No particular reason, aside from the fact that it's something I've been thinking about and I don't want it to go unsaid. On a personal level, I don't know whether 2013 will be better or worse than 2012 (odds are it'll be better, although I don't want to tempt fate), but if I learn anywhere near as much this year as I did last year, it'll certainly be a doozy.