Some Places Where I Used To Live

(Yes, the title is a lame reference to the Gotye song of last year, Somebody That I Used to Know.)

This year I’ve had the opportunity to visit two cities where I used to live. Last month I visited Boston when I attended the AWP conference. And right now I’m at an artists’ residency just outside Chicago called Ragdale.

Here’s the photo of the Boston apartment. In the fresh March snowfall, it looks pretty and like someone actually cleaned the halls once in a while. You can’t see the icky roaches, or the sticky tar roof where I had crazy parties in the summer of 1990 and tried to keep my creepy, drunk frat boy neighbors from coming up to steal the booze:

Yesterday I went into Chicago to explore my old neighborhood, a place I haven’t seen in 39 years. If you’re doing the math, that’s 1974. I was in kindergarten at Eugene Field Elementary School in Rogers Park. The photo at the top is one I took yesterday when I took my late Sunday afternoon walk down memory lane. One thing that struck me was how huge the school was. My kids attend a large, urban public school in Los Angeles. When I drop them off in the morning, I sometimes feel as though they are not going to first grade and fourth grade but to a pint-sized UCLA campus. And in comparison to my kids’ school, this building was enormous, with no green space attached, and a few Southeast Asian teenagers playing some hybrid of soccer and dodgeball in one yard, and some mostly Caucasian third- and fourth-grade age kids playing on the other side. The reason I wanted to see the school, and the nearby block where I used to live, is that I’m writing a section of my book-in-progress that takes place here. I’m still processing it and how to use it, but it gave me perspective to visit the place in reality rather than over and over again in the distorted landscape of my childhood memory and imagination.

Then I walked to the area where I used to live, near Ashland and Estes. Strangely enough, my mother, who has an elephantine memory for many things, including addresses from 40 years ago, could only provide me with an intersection and not a house number. So I walked back and forth and narrowed down my choices: 1) the apartment building we lived in was torn down and replaced with a newer one, 2) the apartment/duplex where I used to live was not exactly as I remembered and was now painted with leopard spots and refitted with bigger windows, not the narrow bedroom slits I remembered from the mid-1970s, or 3) the apartment where I used to live was brick and not exactly as I remembered as a six-year-old. Here are choices 2) and 3):

As I thought when I was trying, probably in vain, to find the place where I used to live with my family just before my parents divorced, perhaps it’s true that you can’t go home again. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can find your old elementary school. My last stop in Rogers Park was Loyola Park, next to Lake Michigan on Morse Avenue, where my mom used to walk with us, if only to have a break from the den of bickering and too-close family quarters that was our apartment:

Before I leave the Chicago area, I’m going to visit the suburb of Roselle, where I spent part of first grade. And where my mom, pretty unhelpfully, tells me we used to live near a plastic factory. Maybe that’s why the tadpoles my dad caught in the nearby pond died. Either that, or because my parents didn’t feed them.

There is a point to all of this. I’m just not sure what it is yet. I think it’s my best attempt to answer the question of where I was from.