3B
Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement
3B
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MichiganDaily.com
Ode to vintage stores
T
here was a big pond behind the
third house of my childhood.
The first night we moved in,
all five of us ran down to it — my two
brothers, mom, dad and me — and we
slipped, slid and pushed each other across
the ice. Snow was coming down from the
sky in big chunks. (It was one of those
typical winter nights, I’d later learn, that
poised you well for a snow day the next
day). We ran up from the pond after our
new neighbor kindly asked us to quiet
down and ripped off our sweatshirts and
jeans — none of us had bought winter coats
yet. Later that night, we all piled into the
car and went to a store called Meijer that
we’d never heard of before, picked out our
own frozen meals and ate them in foldable
chairs with disposable forks before falling
asleep on air mattresses in empty rooms.
A new childhood was dawning — just
like the two previous childhoods had. I’d
spent the first eight years of life catching
tadpoles and prancing around bayous in
Houston and the next four finding ways
to entertain myself in 110-degree Julys
in Dallas, but moving to Grand Rapids,
Michigan at age 12 was something
distinctly foreign. The oceans, humidity,
prairies, indefatigable heat and roaming
steer of my early memories didn’t
translate to the fenceless, green, fresh-
watered, snow-covered rolling hills of
West Michigan.
I had to change my words, too: I quickly
learned to say “you guys” instead of
“y’all”; “pop” instead of “soda”; to put the
emphasis on “sur” in “insurance” instead
of on “in.” There are twangs my friends
still tease me for which I never could quite
kick, like how I pronounce “museum” or
how I intonate “Grand Haven.” Certain
words, pronunciations and phrases still
walk out of my mouth like little skeletons
from the South who refuse to be fully laid
to rest.
This past December, I returned to
Grand Rapids for a few days. I’ve gone
each New Year’s Day since I left for
college, which was around the same time
my parents moved away again, this time
to the West Coast. The first two years I
returned to visit satisfied the 12 months’
worth of nostalgia for the place I came into
adolescence — they satisfied my desire to
return to the place I still considered home,
even though my family had left. Even in
December, my friends and I would drive
to our old haunts, sometimes just to sit:
Frosty Boy for the lemon soft serve, the
Blue Bridge for a good view of the river,
Lookout Park for another of the city, that
one Meijer on the Beltline for whatever
else we craved (the same one my family
and I first ventured to 10 years ago for a
snow shovel and frozen meals).
But this past New Year’s Day was
distinct. Instead of filling the ache of a
homebound itinerant, the city made me
feel like a stranger. New strip malls had
appeared in place of what I remembered
as roadside forests. The sandwich shop
I’d worked at the summer I turned 17 had
been replaced by a Thai fusion restaurant.
The ice cream shack on the river we’d ride
our bikes to before we could drive was
gone.
Even the people I saw — the ones who
I see once a year at New Year’s Eve — felt
like new people I was getting to know, not
classmates, neighbors and teammates I’d
grown up with. Few of us still belonged to
the city we’d once held in common. Even
if we ended up in the same college towns,
we were no longer bound by the ritual
duties of a shared hometown. Outside of
Kent County, duties like jumping off the
camelback bridge into the Thornapple
River at dusk, like stumbling drunkenly
through the Coast Guard Festival or like
flocking to the 28th Street Steak ‘n Shake
when you were high on a summer’s night no
longer mattered. Ann Arbor has different
rivers, different festivals and different
Steak ‘n Shakes to be experienced.
It seems like three years is the right
amount of time for strangeness to set in —
the right amount of time for the duties to
fade and for new ones to take their places.
When we were all together this past New
Year’s Eve, we all seemed older to me,
more mature for certain. More than that,
each of us now belonged to new places and
new people. It was like being wavering
between two realms of reality. In the first
realm, I knew the whole and complete
picture of my friends’ lives: their classes,
their sports, their hobbies, their other
friends, their houses. All of this became
uncertain in the second realm. Their lives
became more blurry.
I understood. Places change and people
get older. I had my own new places and
people back in Ann Arbor. The kids living
in Grand Rapids now — who are familiar
with the new strip malls, and the non-
sandwich shop, and the ice-creamless
river, and the duties of home among a
shared reality — will come back five years
from now and feel the same way. It was
still unsettling that for the first time since
I was a teenager, Grand Rapids didn’t feel
like home to me.
When does a place start to feel like
home, and when does it stop feeling like
it? Even if I were to walk down the first
block I have a memory of, Lymbar Drive
in Houston, I’d be just another passerby
with the vague recollection that I had
drawn chalk on this sidewalk once, that
I had scraped my knee on that curb, that
I had learned to ride my bike over there.
But Houston does not feel like my home
— it hasn’t for a long time. Nor do Dallas
and now Grand Rapids. I have a hard time
understanding why.
I can’t help but wonder whether or
not these places would feel like home if
I’d lived in them for longer. What’s the
threshold for acquiring a permanent
home? Eight years, three decades, a
lifetime? How long gone is long gone
enough to feel like a tourist in the place
that raised you?
The places I remember growing up have
morphed into an indiscernible yet colorful
bundle of houses, stoplights, sidewalks,
fences, schools and people. Instead of
watching seasons pass by in the same
backyard each year, I saw green summers
and brown ones — ones with big fir trees
and ones with dust. I saw winters both
warm and cold — ones with shorts and
soccer at the playground and ones with
frozen ponds and snow days. As jumbled as
my many homes and childhoods become,
they will never be short on variety and I
will never be short on empathy for those
trying to make a new home in a new place.
Going “home” now to my parents’ house
in Oregon is a day-long parade of early
morning flights, layovers in Las Vegas, or
Minneapolis, or San Francisco, or Seattle
and an unhealthy dose of airport food.
But miraculously I always end up on the
opposite end of the continent feeling as
though I’ve somehow traveled through
time.
I have, in a way: Instead of a singular,
fluid place, my idea of home is interspersed
with hiccups and gaps, with changes and
intervals. There is no handprint in the
cement, no tree I always climbed, no one
long, unhalting, unbroken memory of a
home to which I can return.
There are odd interruptions in the
otherwise continuous flow of a lifetime
with each uprooting; odd interruptions
that inevitably feel like time travel once
I look back at them. Like how my family
and I traveled through time as we drove
northward to Michigan almost 10 years
ago, watching winter become something
unrecognizable as it passed us by in the
car windows. Like how I traveled through
time when I returned to Grand Rapids just
a few months ago, only to see an entirely
new city in its place. Like how I travel
through time after coming back to Ann
Arbor each fall with a breath of relief. No
matter what I’ve been up to, this city feels
the same. This city is home, at least for
right now.
I’ve been here long enough to reach
some of the typical benchmarks: My
Ann Arbor address is on my I.D. and I
have an Ann Arbor District Library card.
There are the unwritten ones, too: I can
figure out how to get back to my house
without GPS if I’ve driven too far away,
give a stranger directions and restaurant
recommendations or tell you where
and when the city’s swing dance group
practices in the summertime.
Then there are the things which truly
christen it as home, like the time my
brother and I dove to the bottom of the
Huron River over and over again to find
the glasses he’d lost the day before. Or
the time my roommate came to jump my
stalled car in the middle of Liberty Street
during rush hour. Or the evening they
closed down all of State Street before the
art fair, and I rode my bike back and forth
down the middle of the road without a
single car or person to look out for.
BY ELLIE KATZ, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN KUZEE
No place(s) like home