Tuesday, September 06, 2005
(2:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
I miss Bourbonnais
This might sound insane -- I'm living in one of the greatest cities on earth, and many new opportunities have opened up to me since I moved here. I do miss Kankakee, though. I miss walking to church or to Olivet's library. I miss El Burrito Loco. I miss having a succession of "in transition"-type roommates. I miss the fact that my house was, to an extent, a social center -- that I could quite frequently come home to find people I didn't know in my house. (I don't necessarily miss the fact that the police would be called when we had a lot of people over, who would generally be sitting quietly and talking.) I even kind of miss working at the chiropractor's office.I miss how easy things seemed in the small-town environment -- how comparatively simple a matter it was to go to the bank, get an oil change, etc. It may not be a morally superior way of life or one that is sustainable in the long term, but there is a certain attractiveness to it. I miss walking around in my neighborhood late at night without a second thought. I miss sitting out on the puny front porch with Justin, Jesse, or Jared.
I miss having a dishwasher. I miss having a toilet that flushed properly most of the time. I miss timely mail service. But then I also miss all the people I used to hang out with more often then -- Natasha, Brett and Tara, Kevin Crimmins, Monica, the aforementioned roommates, so many others. That's the key word: "then," as well as "there." It's a time and a place, my in-between, everybody's in-between (or at least they hope): and now with my big impressive PhD plans, I am pretty domesticated. I was pretty domesticated then, too, by comparison, but still, I was hanging out with a lot of people who, like me, were trying to work as few hours as possible and just get by. Fred once said I was one of the most bohemian guys he knew. I still see Fred and Bethany pretty frequently, at least, but it's not quite the same as the customary Friday night call: "Hey, you guys doing anything? [Of course not.]"
People say that the thing they like about Olivet isn't the institution, it's the people -- for a while I thought they were naive, that they would make just as good of friends at any university. Maybe that's true in some cases, but I think that for those who don't like the institution, who don't believe in this weird thing that's at the center of the life of the town, the bonds to be formed there are much stronger, owing to the feeling put-upon by the Man. The stupid rules, the frustrating limitations -- it binds people together, at least for a time. It makes it seem as though, just by having this house on the edge of campus, just by staying, by existing, we were somehow making a stand, refusing to be defeated -- the world was not worthy of us. At least I did. I felt like it meant something for me in specific to be one of the last hold-outs (every generation of hold-outs thinks of itself as the last). Like there was a reason for me to be there, like it mattered. But also like I was at home, in a weird way, and wouldn't have felt at home if I didn't simultaneously feel this vague... opposition.
(In reality, no one cared, right? No one cared about our dumb little parties where people were huddled on the stupid porch. No one cared about me sitting at picnic table in the park reading Gender Trouble. No one cared about me experimenting with vegetarianism or with whatever else. No one cared about the massive internal conflicts I worked through as I walked around the neighborhood at midnight, often in the bitter cold -- nor the loves I tried to cultivate walking along those same well-worn paths. In real, actual reality, I was just some guy, right?)
I'm not one of the last hold-outs anymore. No, I'm just a poor grad student living in an obscure corner of the city because of the cheap rent. People are closer together here, but things feel less familiar -- the people who live in my building seem less familiar to me than the houses in my old neighborhood. I will still often call it "my neighborhood" or "my house" -- my parents moved out of my childhood home, into a newly developed subdivision, just as I was moving to Olivet. Bourbonnais seems more like the home I remembered than does the city that is actually my home. My parents' house seems so abstract, so removed from everything else in the whole world -- no one's bushes growing through the fence, no wild dog penned up uncomfortably close to the driveway, no neighbors that I know by name at least. The same with my grandparents -- they live closer to my parents now, but it's not the same old house, not the old property I knew. It just gets uprooted, always uprooted, pulled out from under me every time.
