writ 205

HOMECOMING

by elora apantaku

I had bought the entire Kanye West CD, Graduation. Yes, I bought it. A college student never buys music; there are too many illegal ways to get what you want. But I felt respect for this rapper, because he was from Chicago. My permanent address, my home, was only fifteen miles to the north, and on a good day I could see a fragment of it, the Sears Tower, sticking out from the horizon.

I sat on my bed previewing the CD through my MP3 player, an obscure one that no one here knew of, a Zune. Track twelve started with hopeful piano chords, a rising and descending bass line, and a slow throbbing drum beat. It didn’t sound like a rap song, especially not to me when John Legend sang the chorus, “I’m coming home again.” It sounded like a tugging reminder of what home used to be like. My room was dark; my roommate was out. I waited for my mind to catch something else—an interesting thought, a distraction—so that the feeling of bittersweet nostalgia wouldn’t overcome me and I’d be able to focus on the present—getting back to homework or falling asleep.

But I couldn’t stop listening to the song. I’d keep hitting play as soon as it was almost over, cradling my Zune in my hand, letting myself relax on the crisp softness of the twin XL sheets of my bed. Headphones were shoved into my ears so that John was whispering rhymes just for me. “Do you think about me now and then, do you think about me now and then? Oh! Cause I’m coming home again. Maybe we can start again.” As my body lay weak from a sudden urge to just stop, alone in a blank dorm room, my mind drifted with the song back home.

Evanston always seemed like the city to me. I guess, when you think about it, it's rather silly to refer to roughly categorize places into rural, suburban, and urban areas. Even though Evanston is a suburb of Chicago, it's like a city onto itself. It was founded a year before Chicago, in 1836, and has a population of 75,000. It even has skyscrapers equivalent in size to the ones found in Wichita, Kansas (which isn't saying much if you've ever been to that god-awful, desolate town).

I don't remember much about my childhood, but I do remember swimming. At least three times a week, my mom would drive me through downtown Wilmette along Lake Avenue and Green Bay Road into Evanston. I belonged to the Northwestern Aquatic Swimming Association by age five, and because of this, I had the privilege of swimming at Northwestern University's gigantic, Olympic sized pool. At the far end were diving platforms, reaching up to the ceiling at 30 feet. The windows were that high, and in the mornings during practice you could watch the sunrise over Lake Michigan, literally within a hundred feet to the east. There really wasn't much of a beach, which annoyed me as a five-year-old, because all large bodies of water should have luxurious beaches, like the ones in Hawaii. There were just huge rocks, cut into nearly perfect giant squares. They must've been quarried or something, because there's no way nature could have done something so planned.

On the third of July, my family would always drive over to that same Northwestern Natatorium parking lot, and walk across onto the coast of Lake Michigan, if you could call it that. We always packed the necessities. A couple of towels to sit on, a folding chair for mom's sensitivity, bug spray, popcorn, and a lot of diet coke in a small, tattered blue cooler. Wilmette, my home town, always did fireworks on the fourth. We could have gone directly to the Wilmette beach, but with a population of over 30,000, trying to squeeze onto the beach would have proved chaotic at best, especially with a family consisting of three hyperactive and curious daughters. I don't know how my parents found such a remote spot, but there weren't too many other people that came to Northwestern to watch the fireworks over Lake Michigan. It always seemed to take forever to traverse the five miles to the coast, though, because we had to drive through brightly blinking police barriers, that tried to "direct" traffic (if only to make things worse). Large groups of people dragged themselves towards the lake, always carrying blankets and chairs; over pretentious brick roads (the closer you got to the lake, the richer everything became). Every once in a while in the twilight a rogue firework would resound through the suburb houses.

We'd talk about whatever was happening in July. Usually nothing. No school work to be harassed about. No school friends to gossip about. The only thing left were our own internal rarely reflected feelings, and of course, swimming. Every once in a while I'd ask my parents about what they did at work. I knew they were surgeons, but that didn't mean anything to me. I spent my days at home or at the pool. What did my parents do? Was work anything like school? They'd always respond with answers that didn't help much, or that were helplessly jargon-filled for the comprehension of a child. "Work was good, honey. Performed an appendectomy-"
"Mom, what's that?"
"It's when you remove an appendix-"
"What's that?"
"It's an organ-"
"Like the heart?"
And they were always talking about cases. Cases held things. How could they have cases at work? What were they holding onto?

Regardless when we got to the field that spread out and then crashed into a cliff composed of those square quarry rocks there were always things to capture attention. Fireflies were always fun to look for, and I could spend an unhealthy amount of time just looking for them, sitting quietly. Bug spray was administered in seemingly dangerous amounts. It burned the parts of my skin that had been broken, and it stung my eyes and nose. And yet the mosquitoes still persisted. Large clouds of gnats stationed themselves between the crowds of people, as though they also wanted to watch a patriotic display, but were operating on another plane.

If mom and dad had gotten into a fight on the way over, I would escape onto the rocks and try to get close to the lake as possible without falling in. My sisters would do the same. We stretched out our short legs over the gray slabs, and descended to the lake. Our parents would always express concern, but my sisters and I communicated in high, nasally voices, quite aware of each other and the apparent danger of falling in the lake. We were a team, and no danger we faced couldn’t be overcome when we faced it together. That included tumbling into Lake Michigan. I could swim, I knew, and I'd be fine, physically. But mentally, sinking into the indigo lake would be too much for me to handle rationally. Lake Michigan, at least when I was growing up, was infamous for lines of dead fish washed up on shore during summer beach excursions. I didn't know exactly how they died, but I knew the culprit was something called Bacteria. I thought they were little bugs, and I didn't want them attacking me, especially at night.

If mom and dad hadn't gotten into a fight, which was always a possibility, we stayed together, spread out on towels and a singular chair for mom. There were lamp posts nearby, and of course, ten miles away was the greatest city in the world, so you couldn't watch stars. But if you were lucky, there would be a lot of planes and boats, with flashing red pinpoints of light that would reflect over the black lake. The popcorn would be gone in a hurry, and I'd stomach diet coke out of boredom or maybe genuine thirst (or to wash the bug spray out of my mouth). I'd always be itchy, messing around in the grass too much. But once the fireworks started, it was hard to pay attention to much else.

Baby, do you remember when fireworks at Lake Michigan?

They were being launched at least a mile away, and the muffled noise of controlled explosions dragged far behind the actual scene. But the fireworks would reflect off the lake, and lighten up the coast over in our hometown. It was always quiet.

As with any firework performance, the grand finale was always the best part. There really was no other good part to a firework show, unless they managed to put in a star, or a heart, or a smiley face. We'd always point out our favorite kind, but this was not something we'd remember the next day. If we were in Wilmette, maybe we'd hear the music playing on the beach. Something patriotic or some form of popular light rock. Unfortunately, we were miles away, watching silently. Other families were ominously quiet, too, as if they came out of a deep respect for fireworks alone. Indeed, the whole scene was so devoid of humanly noise, that you could hear the waves crash against the quarry rocks if you sat on the edge of the grassy cliff.

Once the finale finished, we'd always clap a little bit, then hustle back into our minivan to get home, but as always, we'd run into the same traffic going as coming. We'd talk about swimming and work some more, and we'd talk about the fireworks. We'd talk about what we wanted to eat for tomorrow's dinner, and we'd talk about, or perhaps the better verb would be, beg for sparklers so that we could run around our pool the next day with little fireworks of our own.

Spark your lighters wave ‘em around; if you don’t know by now I’m talking ‘bout Chi-town.

I was rejected from Northwestern and U of C. I couldn’t stay at home. I had found consolation at the time by talking with one of the teachers who wrote me a teacher rec. He told me that he didn’t like the idea of me staying in the area. He said, and I remember him saying it, and being cheered up even though I had been rejected from two of the best universities in the nation, “You need to go far away to become yourself. It’ll help you find out who you are.”

Everybody got the game figured out all wrong. I guess you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.

I know my childhood wasn’t nearly the same as Kanye West’s; different time, different place, different experiences and privileges. But that didn’t matter to me, hearing that song on repeat for the better part of an hour.

There must be a quiet pulse that infects everyone who lives by it. And by it, I mean the greatest city in the world. I can hear it literally as cars and trucks hum by my house on I-94 into the city. It pulls people in with the sort of magnetism that is found in other pleasures—like falling in love. But it’s not a constant. It’ll always push as it pulls. To what? Pushing me to what? Without that pulse I felt lifeless, not myself.

I’m not saying the fourth of July was ever a happy time for me, or for anyone else. Around the fourth of July, Chicago is hot—crime is rolling through the streets. But my life wasn’t so bad. At least it was interesting. But so are Jazz and Food festivals, the best in the nation. And there were people who loved me nearby; agreed when I told them the large golden ones that fell like willow fronds in the sky were my favorites. I could feel it fifteen miles away, and when I went downtown I could touch it. But on that one night, all up and down the coast, people flocked to the shore. No--not just people. Chicago’s children. It’s a monumentally coordinated movement. I didn’t live in the city with Kanye, but we were both pulled at some time or another, along with some ten million others. And hundreds of miles away, where the Sox are Red not White, I’m still pulled.

I guess you never know what you got till it’s gone

I guess this is why I’m here and I can’t come back home