on homesickness
It’s strange to miss a home while you still have proximity to it. The first time I felt this feeling was when I moved back from college in 2015. My neighborhood’s alderman has only been there for a couple years, but I could sense the shifting demographics - the construction of a Target off a major train line stop was a game changer. The stop, which had long been housed in a beautiful but crumbling old train station smelling of piss or bleach, would be entirely renovated. Back then there was a Popeyes next door, and every so often my parents would bring back three-pieces with biscuits for my brother and me when they came back from the mosque on Fridays.
I noticed a lot more professionals walking their pedigreed hounds, more white gays, more trendy-looking creatives. When I was young, my neighborhood was one of immigrants and working class folk. Uptown was known for its activism and for its concentration of social services since the 1970s. The old alderwoman, Helen Shiller, was in office when multiple psychiatric centers there closed, creating an influx of mentally unstable and unhoused folks. They would linger on corners, saying unsavory things sometimes but mostly keeping to themselves. I learned to not bother anybody. As teens, me and my good high school buddy, both of us wearing knee-high socks, would hang at the local Borders to read music biographies between the tall black stacks. We also scrolled through the CDs, and ordered iced coffee with too much cream and too many sugar packets.
The Borders is a rock-climbing studio now. Around the corner is a quiet side street filled with colorful murals, mostly commissioned by the local Chamber of Commerce (and yes, it smelled like piss before then, too). There are multiple donut shops now. And enough of a nightlife to see twentysomethings in distressed jeans hanging around Lawrence & Broadway to bar hop. I stared after them, bewildered, the first time I saw them. After all the years of people saying avoid Wilson after dark. Now, when I say where I grew up, I’m often met with Oh wow, that area is really happening now. Sometimes mentions of securing lakefront property there.
I don’t blame anyone for wanting something better for themselves. But this place doesn’t feel like mine anymore. My Uptown was one of swimming classes at the Boys and Girls Club by McCutcheon, waiting on the steps of Stewart School (since closed down and turned into luxury housing) to get bussed to my magnet elementary school, learning to ride a bike from the owner of Uptown Bikes, being asked how much do you cost? when I was 18 and walking around in denim shorts and giant purple headphones. Maybe it’s for the best that some of the problematic elements faded. When that happens, it means there are less people like me around. While I don’t live there now, as an adult I can afford the neighborhood I grew up in. I thank the weak class mobility that college education, my skills, connections, and luck have brought. What if I hadn't been so lucky? Uptown would feel much more out of reach. Knowing that makes me a little sad.