Going Home Again

Vis­it­ing fam­ily in Illi­nois. The sub­urbs are awfully bleak. The only “thriv­ing” area is down­town Naperville, though every part of it with any char­ac­ter is being bought or torn down or painted over. Usu­ally when I’m there I hang out at Java & Juice, what felt like the last non-corporate busi­ness down­town. Last win­ter I asked the 17-year-old hip­ster employ­ees if they knew of any good music stores in the west­ern sub­urbs, they just laughed. Now Java & Juice is an empty store­front. I can’t imag­ine what they’ll put in its place, as the sub­ur­ban canon of mall-like stores/restaurants has seem­ingly been exhausted. Maybe a fourth Starbucks?

I drove aim­lessly and dis­mayed up to down­town Wheaton, which has always reli­ably been more dirty and human, to find a sur­real scene of skele­tal frame­works of new build­ings and a town with­out power, the recent result of a brief and tor­ren­tial after­noon thun­der­storm. Busi­ness own­ers stood sta­tioned out­side their dark build­ings, some smok­ing and all casu­ally observ­ing the pow­er­less, cus­tomer­less, slate-gray sur­round­ings. There was an air of res­ig­na­tion to the fact that even with elec­tric­ity, these blocks aren’t any more lively. Telling, that it took sev­eral min­utes of dri­ving in loops before I even real­ized the power was out.

Rifling through boxes full of child­hood ephemera, help­ing reduce the clut­ter my folks are forced to put up with every time they move, find­ing col­lege admis­sion let­ters and Pro­grams of Study book­lets was ter­ri­bly depress­ing. The promises of huge, ancient insti­tu­tions for a dura­tion that now seems largely insignif­i­cant in many respects, hous­ing only sev­eral dozen or so salient, robust mem­o­ries in its four years, few of which have any­thing to do with edu­ca­tion, and many of which feel as dis­tant and dryly historical-factual as junior high or, say, my birth — I feel guilty about them now, but naively so; crammed up against only slightly more yel­lowed marker draw­ings and Cub Scout cer­tifi­cates, pep­pered with paper-mache and book­marked with high school IDs, these cat­a­logues are begin­ning to inherit the quaint futil­ity of those things meant to prove my life. What once felt like the begin­ning of my adult­hood will before long feel like the end of my child­hood, and I imag­ine this is how things will con­tinue to develop. I took com­fort in col­lege nos­tal­gia, and even in my remorse for not hav­ing appre­ci­ated it, because those feel­ings are pred­i­cated on the impor­tance of it, on the belief that at one time, at least, I had access to some­thing “real,” grounded. It was one of the few things in my life I believed I could count as not arbi­trary, when, really, my faith in it was based mostly in its vis­i­bil­ity, in its con­fir­ma­tion by tens of thou­sands of stu­dents every day. I won­der how I’d feel if it had been a tenth of its size.

I guess this all falls into my pat­tern of only trust­ing exter­nal val­i­da­tion. Inter­nal val­i­da­tion is not only hol­low, but dan­ger­ous; but something’s telling me I’m just sup­posed to get over it.