Hello, Chicago, Goodbye: Part 1

This is my fifth and final night in Chicago: the end of 2015, the beginning of 2016. There were, perhaps, no good reasons for coming here alone, and alone again, but circumstances and mindsets dictated action, and this is where I ended up.

Then again, perhaps there don't have to be any good reasons, just reasons. That, I suppose, would cancel any binary labels such as "good" and "bad." Maybe that's Buddhist, but I don't know since I'm ignorant of most faith and belief systems. Regardless, I'm here.

The first full day in Illinois, the final day of 2015, I woke up early after a late arrival and a short night and walked to the train station. From there I rode to my hometown, a place I left decades ago but every so often find myself returning to. The weather was cold. Snow fell as I walked through barely light Chicago, boarded a train, and traveled back in both time and place to my hometown 60 miles away. Each stop along the way was a memory of places where relatives had lived, including the town where my father grew up after my grandfather moved his family up from Kentucky. Through the window and the snow I could see the house my father had lived in, where I had spend many days myself. That, perhaps, was the hardest stop along the line, and I was tempted to disembark and spend time there again. My father would have been 82 now, and I wonder what he would have thought had he been able to walk around that neighborhood again. Would he, like me, be wary of the fine line between nostalgia and mortality, between nostalgia and depression?

When the train stopped in my hometown, I got off the train and started to the downtown square, a place I'd walked so many times before. The snow had let up, but the air bit into my bare skin so sharply that my eyes watered. Like a bird, I circled around and before heading toward the house in which I had grown up. The walk was familiar and I could have done it had I been blind: the streets where my paper route had been; the field my friends and I had played in; the schools I had attended. It did feel strange: a sense of being home coupled with a sense of being an outsider. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the house and shut my eyes and let myself barely cross that line between nostalgia and depression, then regrouped and retraced my route back downtown.

Stopping for lunch in a small restaurant, I looked at everyone who was old and wondered if I had known them or their children. After more wandering, I boarded the train back to Chicago.