bevedog

or, old man yells at township

Side note: I was told that the “subscribe” button in my posts was going to a plea to pay money for a subscription. I think that must be a default Substack message, because I don’t intend to charge for this very irregular and personal newsletter. I think I fixed it but let me know if you ever see a message asking you for money for this newsletter.

After our time in Beloit was up [see last newsletter -ed.] Nick and I had way too much time to kill before our flight home from Chicago O’Hare. I dragged Nick with me to pay a brief visit to Evanston, the Chicago suburb where I went to college and met Shanon when we both worked for the new Barnes & Noble there. I did give Nick a choice, and “take a nostalgia tour with dad” won out over “sit in O’Hare for five hours.”

The first place we went was to see the apartment building where I lived after college. It’s on Ridge, just North of Howard at the far southern edge of Evanston. The place looked exactly as I remembered it from thirty years ago. What I had forgotten was just how many three-story brick and stone apartment buildings are in that part of Evanston. Since living there, I have lived in Denver, Newark DE, Austin, San Diego, and Colorado Springs, and I don’t think I have lived in a neighborhood with housing as dense as in that part of Evanston.

We drove Sheridan Road north toward downtown and I kept having funny feelings of deja vu or some other form of anti-disorientation. Clearly a lot of it was memories coming back to me, but it was overlaid with something more surreal, and I think that something was thirty years worth of dreams.

I dream of college and of Evanston a lot. And since I have only been back briefly since I moved away, those dreams are built of poorly-remembered fragments of streets and buildings, memories that I imagine get degraded each time I access them like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. But now I was getting direct access to the source material that my subconscious has been using for decades.

I was able to successfully navigate the living dreamscape to arrive at Clark & Sherman street. On Sherman, the buildings were the same but most of the occupants had changed. The Sherman Sna(ck) Shop diner is gone. The textbook exchange is gone. Bookman’s Alley closed in 2013, reopened under new management, then closed again just a month before our visit (though the alley framing shop that employed student actors is still there). The Barnes & Noble where Shanon and I worked and first met is gone, replaced with a Verizon store The Unicorn Cafe is tantalizingly almost there, with the maroon and cream colors and signs on the window intact, but it’s empty and permanently closed.

And all around are large high-rise building hemming things in. And all these expensive-looking, newer buildings contributed to my snap judgement that things here are kind of dead. There was another coffee shop that looked kind of interesting and seemed full of students, but everything else felt kind of dead and crummy to me.

Thank god for Buffalo Joe’s, where we ended our little tour. Still on the first floor of the “Clarkgate”(!) apartment building where I lived for two years, and where Shanon lived separately and coincidentally a bit later. Still sporting the green awnings and the same logo. Still with what appeared to be the same menu. Still with the large metal mixing bowls for tossing the wings in the sauce. Still offering “suicide” hot wings which I thought modern sensibilities might have induced them to change. Still serving waffle fries in fake cheese sauce. Still serving RC Cola and only taking cash!!! They even have the same corny posters they had in the dining room in 1993.