A gap forms in the halting, east-west traffic gliding slowly on 12th Street.
From the Oak Park side, I run through the opening southward, skipping between
a paused Ford truck and a drifting Mazda SUV.
I still move comfortably at 71 as I enter the neighborhood where I ran until 17.
The numbers in my age switch places.
My mind’s normal flow of images reverses from outside-in to inside-out.
A blue sign up to my left proclaims, “Clarence Avenue.”
The Burger King to my right greets me like it did when Ken Sidorowicz and I walked there at night to talk and wolf down fries.
A familiar, brown bungalow down the block calls out, “Hey Richie!”
I imagine its door opening …
Colorful, T-shirted figures, some wearing black gym shoes, others red sneakers, bolt past me down the concrete steps like kids going out to play.
On this side of Roosevelt, in Berwyn, I’m a different guy in a different time.
Nostalgia is a powerful, ironic force; its banality belies the intensity of its Greek roots. The current Oxford definition describes it as a “sentimental longing for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”
But these roots are not so Little-House-on-the-Prairie-like. “Nostos” refers to homecoming, but “algos” refers to pain. In fact, nostalgia was first coined by a Swiss physician to capture the anxieties experienced by mercenaries fighting far from their homelands. Those anxieties manifested symptoms of physical and psychological disease. Homesickness was just that.
When I left Berwyn in my late teens, I didn’t experience the warm version of nostalgia. Instead, for many years into my 40s, I tried to transcend being from there at all. Homesickness for me was something I tried to immunize myself from by stuffing my young, Berwyn self into deep, psychological shadows. Doing so made me freer to excel professionally and to bond with folks with more sophisticated, progressive backgrounds.
But even then, nostalgia’s challenges weren’t new: They first reared their heads when I was 13. When my parents sent me from Berwyn to Fenwick as a freshman, I got my first taste of being seen as backward in the eyes of middle- and upper-middle-class kids. Some of my teammates on the Friars baseball team called me “the greaser.”
I did wear those pointed-toe shoes to school. I guess the kid from across Roosevelt carried himself differently from the guys from Oak Park and River Forest.
I missed my friends who had gone to Morton West. Dad let me transfer there as a junior. But on my first day at Morton, in “M” Hall, I got into a fight. So much for going home again!
A guy who had been ambling with his friends behind me stepped around in front of me and punched me in the face. He accused me of walking in front of him. Stunned, I was still able to get him into a headlock after the momentum from his thrown punch brought him in low. I held the headlock, spun him into the door of a locker and punched him repeatedly in his ribs. His friends jumped in: “OK, it’s over.” Someone yelled “Magro’s coming!” (Mr. Magro, I learned, was the school’s disciplinarian). People scattered. Someone ran off with my Latin book. I went on to class.
Nostalgia is complicated; it’s more than a longing for a happier time. It’s also missing who you were when you were there, even if it was hard to be you at the time. It can walk you into a punch.
Inner work and writing about the early days have caught me up with the boys and men I used to be. For almost 30 years, I’ve been an Oak Parker. I didn’t have to let go of the past to love it here. In fact, I made peace with it and brought the evolving Berwyn guy with me.
Oak Park had, in fact, begun to bring that young man into the bold visions it framed of a strong, thriving multiracial community in the early ’70s. As I’ve written elsewhere (Peeling Back the Layers of Racial Bias, Wednesday Journal, Feb. 10, 2021), I was only 20 when, as a first-year master’s student in community development, I interned for a year in the Community Relations Department.
I was so inspired by the way the village stepped out ahead of the other suburbs on race that I knew no matter where my graduate education and career took me, if I were ever going to come back to the Chicago area, it would be Oak Park. And that’s what happened. In 1996, I returned with a wife and four kids, purchasing a house on Scoville Avenue.
Today, no matter what complicated memories 12th Street might evoke in me, the only home I truly pine for is the one I live in now.
