barrettchase.com

barrettchase.com
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Tue, 08 Feb 2011

About a year ago, we moved to the neighborhood of my childhood. It's hard to explain why I like this part of the city so much. It isn't nearly as pretty as the areas near the lake, although it does have its charm. There are absolutely no good restaurants out here, except for a couple of diners. Entertainment options are practically nonexistant. It's a lot like living in a very small town. I guess it just feels comfortable to me.

One of the things that strikes me as interesting as I walk or drive down the neighborhood streets is how familiar I am with the bums and/or weirdos who wander around out here. Many of them I actually remember from way back when I was a kid. That guy with the huge backpack staring up at the flagpole outside of McDonald's? He's been doing that since 1985. He'll probably be doing that for many years to come.

Some of these people are really beginning to show their old age. Others are around my age or even a few years younger. I know some of their names. Others I only know by sight.

It's easy to become nostalgic as I travel through the neighborhood. I often eat breakfast in a greasy spoon on Grand Avenue. Sometimes I'll look out the window and try to remember what it was like before they tore down the buildings across the street to make way for Kmart. Sometimes I think picture the old wooden railroad trestle that used to snake its way through the area. The buildings are gone, and the trestle is gone, but the whack jobs who used to hang out underneath the trestle are still around, and chances are, they're probably shopping at Kmart.

Maybe these people are part of the reason that I feel comfortable out here. Not that I want to be friends with them or anything, but they're part of what anchors me to the place. In a world where everything morphs so rapidly, things change here glacially. I might not know what 2015 will look like in the world at large, but here in this neighborhood, I can rest assured that that blonde lady with the orange bandana will be somewhere within nine blocks of Memorial Park.

Walking down Grand Avenue or Central Avenue, it's easy to travel through time. I'm so intimately familiar with these streets that at any given moment, I can blink and be back in 1990 or 1981 or even forward to 2020. They only things that change are the cars. I have to mentally alter those, but otherwise it's no problem at all.

And as I do this, someone in one of the cars inevitably says, "Hey," looking at me. "There's that guy."

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