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.