I was last in this spot forty-four years ago when I was six years of age and much of who I was had already been defined inside of me. Maybe time acts a lot differently than we think it appears, and all of our moments have already happened and we stretch out across a predefined path.
This is what I'm going with, at least, as I sit in a space I remember very differently but never really give it too much thought. My memory matches, but where I'm typing this used to be a field but now its concrete. It is perhaps fitting that it is a chain restaurant and my wandering mind wants to look up the date of this building and place together when this space was transformed.
Either way, I'm about a quarter mile away from the place I learned to read, a place where I heard the Beatles for the first time, the place where I was fascinated with what my older siblings were doing and the lives they had. We were only here for two and a half years, but without that time there is no way that I ever would be me the way I am.
I can't see the house from here, but I remember that the neighborhood had a defined edge and beyond it was wilderness. This was a field but now its concrete. Either way, there are small birds chirping and getting on with their lives.
I'm not sure if I remembered the neighborhood sloping upward or if that's just the new experience mingling with the memory, two times of my life touching each other. I don't have any real memories of leaving this place in May or June of 1980 as I hadn't learned to write by that point.
I'm only here in 2024 because I learned how to write and learned how to make a living off of my curiosity. My biggest hope is that more people can figure out how to do that and that more people learn how to look back at their life with wonder and hope. We all live so many days and there are so many moments that get forgotten.
I created this blog at one point to document some of my journey, but most of my personal writing is written down and stored in a box 750 or miles southeast of here in the community where I've lived for nearly 22 years now. I look back at all of that and in my mind it seems like a chaotic spirograph that still makes sense.
I'm here forty-four years later because I had the opportunity to see a little bit of the future on a trip to Champaign-Urbana, and I will write that up for others who did not have that experience. I make a living writing about my community. Someone last night called me a unicorn after I explained my philosophy of journalism and my absolute love of what I do right now.
When my family left here, we left a much bigger metropolitan area, about 30 minutes or so away from a major midwestern city on Lake Michigan. Our television could pick up ten stations at least, and one of them showed a lot of cartoons and I watched a lot of them. My memory tells me I didn't really see my parents that often, and I remember being allowed to roam all day throughout the neighborhood.
I spend ten minutes looking up this location on Google Earth. The address sounds like a droid's designation in Star Wars, a film that came out 47 years ago. The earliest available imagery for 6450 IL-53 is from 1985, and sure enough it's how I remembered. We used to be able to walk to the golf course, and later on I'll walk around as best I can to see what memories show up. The image from five years after is not clear, but there was no concrete here yet.
I'm sure there were birds, just like now.
Nine years later in March 1994, a much more clearer picture shows that whatever wilderness had been here was being graded for development. I was enrolled at Virginia Tech and on my way to becoming a writer. At the time a satellite took a black and white image of where I'm sitting right now, I was back there helping put together a newspaper twice a week, already showing signs of tremendous interest in the community around Blacksburg.
In April 1998, the northeast quadrant of this development was under construction, but where I'm sitting was not yet built. By then I was working in Georgetown for a publishing company in a job that was far from glamorous and one I didn't like because it means spending time on the phone calling to confirm people who had positions in municipal government all across the nation. When I resigned to move away, they let me do the work remotely as a contractor, allowing me to spend a year in Calgary, Alberta.
In March 2002, this building here I'm sitting was not here yet, but the parking lot was here, likely to support the Cinemark movie theater that still stands about 300 feet away. I was married and living in Roanoke, working a restaurant job to support my journalism habit. I relied on freelance payments and it was never enough so I kept looking for a real job.
A heron flies across the sky above IL-53.
In April 2005, this building existed but the imagery does not have any information about whether what was in it. I had been in Charlottesville for over two and a half years. I ended my first marriage and was in another relationship and my second child was on the way. This blog existed but I'm not too interested in going back to that point.
In April 2005, the other buildings in this development were not yet constructed but they were on the way. By this point, the imagery updates much more often. In July 2005, there does not appear to be a patio. That's where I am now, and why I can watch the small birds, chickadees, I think.
In May 2024, an app called Merlin on my phone can identify species, and they are house sparrows. I wonder if these birds are related to any of the birds that would have been in the field that used to be here.
In August 2006, the building that currently houses the Jam and Jelly Cafe was built. The one that houses the Starbucks was not. That wouldn't happen until at least March 2018. I was about to leave Charlottesville Tomorrow, a non-profit organization that I helped create but never owned. I may have written about that in this blog, but I put my heart and soul into the work I did there but I had no ownership stake. I spent over eleven years there and for all of that time, I never came back to here. But I began planning for this moment.
I drove up this morning from Champaign-Urbana on I-57, and the flat topography eventually gave way to something more rolling, and the neighborhood I used to live in slopes up. When I am done writing this and I have had something akin to a meal, I will go for a walk around the area, though I hesitate.
I began to ignore the GPS directions for a specific location when I realized I was not going to make it in time to attend the grand opening of the Village of Woodridge Police Department and Public Works Campus. I thought it was a quicker drive, but I was wrong. I will always admit when I'm wrong.
A plane ascends into the sky and I'm not sure sure where from. It's the first I've seen in the time I've been sitting outside listening to the sparrows. The only time I've been back to Chicago was when I had to fly through here, perhaps to Calgary.
And here I am, and I don't have any doubt that this is where I am supposed to be, indulging in a brief trip that I can afford because enough people pay me to write about the community. I always want to know what it would have been like to grow up here, to have grown up with the same people who were in my nursery school, my kindergarten class, my first grade class. I didn't have that choice, because I left when my family left.
I didn't have any idea where I would stop. I have a hotel room in Downer's Grove tonight, a place name I know but don't know too much about and haven't looked it up. I'm here until Monday morning, the day I'll go to Chicago for the first time in forty-four years. I have a package for someone who lives there and at this point there are no concrete plans at all.
I ended up driving past the Village of Woodridge Police Department and Public Works Campus, but didn't stop because it was past noon and any public officials who might have been there had likely left. I wanted to introduce myself and ask questions. I think I recognized some of the area.
I did not put the address of the home we lived in from the fall of 1977 to the spring of 1980 in the GPS because part of me didn't know if I really wanted to see it for sure. Maybe the two times shouldn't touch? When salmon swim back upstream, don't they die? I know I want to live for as long as I can within reason. Will this trip hasten my end, or is that a metaphor I shouldn't put too much faith in?
Either way, I drove on and saw a sign for 63rd Street, which I knew from looking up this place on Google Maps. My memory has imprints of this neighborhood and other places I explored other than this field that's now a Buffalo Wild Wings and I've not ordered food. I just wanted to sit here and look toward the general location of where I lived for less than a thousand days. I'm imagining a green light across the way, wondering what I'm looking at. Sitting here and typing and writing and thinking and not ordering food and having a beer to pay for the table, there's nothing really to find.
Nothing concrete, anyway. Is this my wilderness, or is this a home I've always dreamed of? Is this why I always dream of cities, always dream of places where there are many more people?
I drove along 63rd Street, a name for a roadway that seems disconnected from the suburban reality, single-family houses on nice lots, some of which I probably went in when I was a little kid between 4 and 6 in an era when I was allowed to roam around, wanderings that likely put me in the place I'm sitting now, sparrows chirping away, cars driving endlessly on IL-53, another plane flies over.
I knew if I drove long enough, I'd see Arnold Drive, one of four small suburban streets that form a grid between IL-53 to the west, Clark Drive to the east, Woodridge Drive to the south, and 63rd Street to the north. Just to the north of 63rd Street is a linear park I remember walking through. Once I fell off a tornado slide and had to go to the doctor to be checked out. I was hanging out with a kid younger than me, no parental supervision.
I didn't remember the names of Arnold Drive's companions, but I knew I was in the right area, because I remembered a baseball field and thought about parking there to walk around. But I kept driving west on 63rd. I saw the public access to the trail, no parking.
I drove past Winston Drive and thought I was in the right place. I drove past Clark Drive, Bradley Drive, and there it was. Arnold Drive. I looked up the hill and something clicked. The puzzle pieces of my life fell into place, and where I was looking up the street where I used to live, where I learned to read, where I idolized my brother and sister, where I have all sort of memories that don't connect to anyone else because I don't know what happened to any of the kids I used to play with, don't remember their names. Do any of them live here still? What happened to them?
What happened to me? Who am I?
I'm the person who experienced a total wave of full emotions, pausing for a moment to look up the street, but not wanting yet to stop and look and walk around. I became aware I'm a total stranger, and I needed to ground myself.
And now I've written this, a pure example of how I use writing to think about who I am, wishing so much that others would do that and would realize that every single person's story is important and worth writing about, worth knowing, worth caring about, worth existing.
I've got more time to spend here, and I am going to walk around. Now I'm going to eat the food I finally ordered and then I'll plot out the rest of my time. At some point I have to get back to work, because the person who writes stories about my community was once a little boy who roamed this space and has finally returned for some reason that hasn't fully been written yet.
