Jogging Memories

I drove by the house I grew up in the other day.  Not the apartment building of my childhood, not any of the apartments or condos or town homes I landed in, briefly, along the way. The house I grew up in, from the time I was about thirty-four.

It wasn't even finished yet, the suburban house in the kind of neighborhood I used to drool over as a city kid, the kind of neighborhood I later began to dread as I embraced the kind and gentle (relatively speaking, for a New Yorker) urban life on the north side of Chicago. We were lured by the promise of fenced in back yards and cavernous two story family rooms and decent public schools.

My first morning there, I went for a run. The darkness and the quiet frightened me, almost as much as the young black boy had, down in the city months earlier, when he had reached inside his jacket for an imaginary gun while I sat in my car, boxed in at a traffic light, my two children sleeping ducks in their car seats. At least I could see him. Here, I could barely see the reflective stripes on my running shoes. I wondered what unknown evils lurked within the opaque suburban dawn.

As it turns out, though it wasn't all what one would dream it would be behind a white picket fence, it wasn't all bad. All sorts of memories flooded my brain as I drove by the old house -- the firsts, the joys, the challenges. Our swing set had been felled years earlier by a micro burst, but the loss seemed startlingly fresh when I noticed the new people had installed their own swing set, on the wrong side of the yard. Where the old cobwebbed trampoline was supposed to be. I wondered what other changes they had made, what else they had done to dismantle the life that had once belonged to us there. There, where I raised three children and grew up alongside them, or at least tried to. A jumble of years, memories of rude and not so rude awakenings in the quiet early morning hum of suburbia. By the time I left that house, I felt as unfinished as the kitchen had looked the day we moved in.

I went to a party in the old neighborhood last night, blocks away from that house where my kids -- and I -- grew up, a stone's throw away from my oldest daughter's best friend's house. There were a few familiar faces, but I felt like a stranger, not unlike the way I felt on that first morning run so many years ago. At the party in the old neighborhood, everybody still seemed forty-something, the way I used to be. They seemed so young and content, relieved by the relatively new found freedom of raising older children, but not yet struggling with the puzzling irrelevance that overtakes you when they actually leave. When the band packed up and the eerie darkness and quiet settled over the large yard, I wondered what unknown evils lurked beyond the orange flicker of the fire pit. I felt unfinished, still, and uncertain.

I am back in my townhouse, one suburb over but seemingly a world away, the house I am growing up in these days. The rumble of the train only a half block away is my security blanket, the steady stream of headlights reassures me. I will go for a run in the morning, a slower, more plodding run than that run so many years ago. It will hurt more, but I might not feel quite as lost. Still not quite sure, though, how I got here, or what lies ahead.