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

