[one-sided cell phone conversation on New York City-bound train]

“No! I never called you from his house.”

“Don’t you remember that was when you said you never wanted to see me again?”

“Look, maybe we should just get a divorce.”

[long pause]

“Are you still going to pick me up at the train station?

[Logan Square]
“I thought you were supposed to be my wingman?”
(friend pauses)
“But this bar smells like a toilet.”

[Bucktown]
“She’s multitalented. I mean besides the being married part.”

[East Village]
“Do you remember that girl who was passed out on the couch at the bridal shower? That was her. She has an eating disorder.”

I first met Michigan City when I was two. I do not remember this. I remember early pictures of me in a pink winter jacket breaking icicles off of the weird white wrought-iron furniture inherited with the house. I remember my parents deciding their new Chicago-person-weekend-place was suitable to cross-country skiing. I remember throwing up Burger Chef in the car when I was pretty small and there was still Burger Chef. I remember eating at Mr. Steak and Golden Bear and visiting the TV repair store numerous times and staring at the vacuum tubes.

Weekends were spent here every weekend and summers too, long drives along burnoffs and oil tanks and wastewater treatment, past the beaux arts train station in Gary, past roadside motels (were there tourists?) like Al & Sally’s, like the now bombed-out looking one at the junction of US 12 and US 20 and the toll road about which I once overheard someone on the South Shore Line look at out the window and say, “What is this, fucking Beirut?”

I didn’t appreciate it then and how could I; I was a kid and all my friends were having birthday parties with each other on the weekends, later they were going downtown to Water Tower Place or Marshall Field’s to harass salesladies into giving them perfume samples or something. I felt I was missing out. I was being dropped off in a beachside town with a confused identity (it, not me, but maybe that too) and driven to the library on weekends to buy 10-cent used copies of Reader’s Digest and check out Trixie Belden books and sit in yellow-lacquered-blue-carpeted-inside egg chairs and read and read until the time had passed. (Later, when I was older and allowed to be both more independent and more trashy, I would just get dropped off at the mall on the way into town and buy a copy of Soap Opera Digest and a cookie from the Mrs. Fields’ knockoff in the food court, but soon my interest in complete garbage must’ve turned to boys, or sports, or something.)

There used to be a big grocery store out on 20 called Bernacchi’s, it was more like a ramshackle giant tented farmer’s market than the corporate Jewel Foods (still abandoned) in town and I clearly remember the meat maps; every now and then my mom and I would go and I’d be handed an enormous cookie at the checkout counter, something I in my childhood thought was a magical prize associated specifically with making it through that huge grocery store. I thought it was from the grocery store as a gift. This possibly explains my misguided view of the world’s generosity to this day.

Other free things procured in town were lollipops, anytime I was dragged along to the liquor store. This was a feature of booze shops in Chicago as well, but they were especially forthcoming with the Spangler’s Dum-Dums lollipops at both the Michigan City Liquors store (next to where my mom and I once saw a guy get hit by a car) and at the later-established, more upscale (for Indiana) King Richard’s. Seriously, if you bring your kid into the liquor store with you they get a free lollipop. Nice positive associations, you weird drug pusher storekeepers you.

Until the late ’80s Michigan City’s pleasures were limited (to my knowledge) strictly to Marquette Mall and the beach. Marquette Mall is now a dead mall, and the beach is as wonderful as ever. Coastal people occasionally engage in debate over whether the Great Lakes really have legitimate beaches. They can go shove it — my beach is the best one I’ve ever been to and there’s no nasty saltwater either.

At some point the semi-lost-soul-Hoosier/part-time-Chicagoan town decided a bit of economic stimulation was needed, so they accepted a bid for one of the country’s first outlet malls to be built over by the NIPSCO plant (not a “nuke-ular” plant, though it looks the same as one) and the Jaymar Ruby Sans-a-Belt slacks factory. The outlet mall boasted startling new brand names the likes of which 46360 had never seen before, like Benneton. City folk made Michigan City more of a destination and the mall back by the highway started to fail. Soon the novelty gift store, the creepy hidden video arcade, the Claire’s Boutiques, B. Dalton, and the corn dog stand would all be gone. Today the anchor stores are still there (Sears, Carson Pirie-Scott, and JC Penney’s) but the bulk of Marquette Mall is abandoned save for an oversized Hallmark shop, a 365-days-a-year Christmas store, and a couple of cell phone stands. I tried to buy shoelaces there this past weekend, just to see if I could, and despite the two or three extant shoe stores, I had to go across the parking lot to Walgreen’s. Walgreens used to be inside the mall but moved outside to a detached space more convenient to passing car traffic, and only a few steps across the road from the liquor store that used to be Pizza Hut and also sells drum equipment.

I had my first swim lessons and my first positive day camp experiences at the Michigan City YMCA down on Coolspring. I was in Polliwogs or Guppies or Silverfish or whatever and have been, as a result of this place, a swimmer my whole life. I also had a gymnastics class here where the instructor, no doubt fourteen though I’m sure I thought she was ancient, was so mad at me once she insisted smoke would come out of her ears. I was terrified. I had a swim at the Michigan City Y just last year and I don’t think the locker room had been updated or even cleaned since I was a Polliwog. The pool was fairly disgusting too. Yesterday they had their YMCA charter revoked.

It was in high school, aided by the acquisition of a driver’s license and also a growing pinball habit, that I started exploring the town in earnest. I found the bad neighborhoods of Michigan City — sketchy video arcades on Michigan Avenue and abandoned gas stations out on the west side of town, all kinds of places I had never seen while shuttling with my parents from the old McDonald’s to the place you could rent VHS tapes and the VCRs to watch them on (or, hey, laserdiscs!) in the back of the stereo store by K-Mart. The General Cinemas 1-6 was also a popular spot for me, except for the time I got dropped off there without money and was too scared to cross the busy intersection of US 421 and US 20 to get to the mall and kill the next 90 minutes til my parents came back to pick me up.

In more recent years the city took another stab at economic development by deciding to allow a casino. A casino! According to state law this had to be an offshore enterprise, meaning, a boat, meaning, they were going to have to build a ship in Trail Creek. A casino riverboat was built, nothing seaworthy, but it can sail out a few feet away from the dock once every hour and stay legal with the feds. I went out to it once, played maybe one slot machine, and ran back ashore before I was trapped in the creek for an hour.

The casino is so “successful” that it has displaced many of the poorer people’s homes and allowed for the creation of a four-story parking garage, something I never thought we’d need in Michigan City. They have also expanded the riverboat by building a larger structure around the existing boat, kind of like when you fix your pool by pouring another layer of concrete inside it. More and more unexplained and hideous construction happens on it all the time.

A million other things happened and disappeared here too: Fried’s Cat Shelter, whose name became more than ironic when the entire thing was destroyed by fire, the Franklin Pharmacy whose animated neon mortar-and-pestle are now echoed bizarrely in the modern logo of the newly erected Walgreens across the street, the crazy-arc architecture of Al’s Grocery Store that became Frank’s Nursery and Crafts that became Goodwill that became, I think, abandoned, the hobbit-renovated brick brewery on 8th street that nature has nearly fully reclaimed, the strip mall that came and went at Lake Shore Drive and Lake, the Hot’n'Now burger drive-thru that is now a delicious low-rent Mexican joint.

Wherefore art thou, weird old timey Michigan City? Not to worry, the world’s most angularly modern library is still thriving, the creepy observation tower still looms atop the depressing zoo, the dunes still roll even in the shadows of teetering apartment developments, and yes, most importantly, the electric trains from Chicago still go right down the middle of the street.

A couple years ago friends of mine started moving towards Michigan City, which completely confused me and changed the landscape from one of isolation and escape (and, occasionally, being trapped) to one into which my adult life, my social and musical world, had leaked bizarrely over. Really? You guys live up the road a piece and stop at the new Meijer by the highway on your way into town? And Joe — who has salvaged telltale yellow castoff shelves from that hypermodern library I spent most of my youth in, and stocked them with actual good books and magazines I doubt anyone else in the entire town is in possession of — he and those shelves now inexplicably lives just a short winter’s wander from my parents’ place, a much cozier place to end up on, say, New Year’s or many other other eves, rather than in the big city. (You can walk down the main street of our neighborhood if you like, or you can also walk home via the beach. If you have never had a friend whose house you could walk home from in the middle of the night via the beach, let me tell you — you are really missing out.)

I can’t imagine what will happen to this place, this strange commercial failure with sand in its shoes, revitalized and pillaged both by the serpentine stream of Illinois license plates that imbue it with cash and deplete it of long-term character. The changing commercial landscape is novelty and America both: it falls apart in ways that maybe it should, but that are also saddening in that now-every-viable-business-is-an-IHOP-by-the-interstate kind of way. (Tres Indiana.) And yes, I’m a nostalgic fool, but wouldn’t you be if you grew up in fractional summers by the hot wind blowing in the dune grass, just down the beach from monkey island?

In October 1995 a Canadian guy by the name of Scott Rumble stopped me from punching out a really annoying girl at a Guided By Voices show in London, Ontario. (Her, throwing elbows and hair; her friend, throwing herself inexplicably at guitarist Mitch Mitchell.) Three years later I’d take him up on his offer to crash at his four-square apartment in Burlington, the city where my grandfather died: I distinctly remember crossing the border at Port Huron in a slate-grey fall, and driving round a twilight bend on the 403 near Waterdown where I pulled over and told Scott I was nearby.

“We’ll put some tea on for you,” he said. I was moving to Canada and I really had no idea what I was doing.

For three weeks straight I woke up every day in Scott and Lisa’s spare room next to an enormous weaving loom. I would toast bagels that I bought at the very Canadian store at the end of the street, drink coffee and pore over the pathetic housing offerings in the Toronto Star. Toronto had a less than 1% vacancy rate in 1998 and I didn’t even have a job. I didn’t even have a bank account. But I did have Belle & Sebastian’s The Boy With the Arab Strap on a cassette backed with Saint Etienne’s Good Humour and a new leather coat, and among the growing chill and falling leaves and complete infestation of squeegee kids in autumnal Toronto, I found a beautiful apartment, just by seeing a sign, on the street I wanted to live on. I pulled up to look at it for the first time knowing I had found the place before even peering inside, putting the car in park with my heart in my throat just as the Saint Etienne tape hit the drum break in “Goodnight Jack” and, y’know — sometimes you just know.

I didn’t think I was necessarily going to leave Toronto and I didn’t think I was necessarily going to stay forever. I feel like that first year — the new friends I’d end up drifting from, or working alongside, or being closer to than ever nine years later, the shops and streets and streetcars I navigated — was as much about learning myself as learning a new city, a new country. I find it hard to believe I outlasted Peter Dunn’s Vinyl Museum, or, conversely, that I still rent my movies at the same place I did when I might not have known any better. And when I fell into community eventually — writers, more than the usual musicians I’d gotten used to slumming it with back in the states — it was small and wonderful and inspiring and immediately full of the coincidence I’ve come to accept as natural in my life no matter where I am or what is happening. I made it home and it made me, in spite, or because, of the fact that I was pretty much winging it.

What’s amazing about leaving here at the same time as I arrived is how unbittersweet the sweetness is. If you’re not insane, fall is your favourite season: the sense of renewal that is also wrapped in closure, the feeling of reprieve and bracing for winter both. My house is full of red maple leaves grabbed from wherever in whatever moment and pressed into hidden places in attempts to weakly seize this feeling. This year, I fantasized about fall all summer until I realized it wasn’t just that ache for crispness and cider and cozying-in but the so-obvious-once-it-dawns-on-you essence of new beginning. I literally stared longingly at a cardigan hung on my bedroom closet handle for a full month before I realized what it was trying to tell me. Fall isn’t about hunkering down to avoid the world, I think: it’s about clearheadedness and nostalgia coming to the same point. I wasn’t just restless for autumn’s magic to hasten its crunchy step towards me, I was itching to be right back where I started from, at the beginning of adventure in the total sense. My house is now half-packed and the weather is about ready for me to put on that sweater.

Though I’d expected a shiver of advance regret at loading my last days here with paperwork and ministorage, in almost all senses I know it is the perfect time. The city feels and smells as magical at the end of this chapter as it did at the beginning; I see it with the same fresh eyes, and rather than marking off this month as sad, I feel everything and everyone infused with so much love, my every step kicked up a beat by the excitement of the future and the rightness of all around me, forging the connection between where I am now and where I will be one month from now. And if there’s anything the last years have taught me it’s about how when you love so many places and people you necessarily need to live life more fluidly: I am not ending this, I am not never coming back and walking and talking and wasting days in cafes and driving down to Cherry Beach late at night. I am just going to be doing it with a different frequency and from a different vantage point. And if anyone’s noticed how desperately homesick I am for Chicago all the time and how I just manage to work its charms into my vaguely scheduled cycle, you’ll know I’m confident I will pull off weaving these threads in, too.

So instead of spending the weekend attached to a tape gun and an occluding anxiety, I’m up north in the heart of fall, surrounded by the family that took me then and still takes me now, an ever-expanding brood of tiny nephews who stand on my legs and stare and giggle at me, parents who don’t mind my only-child tendencies around their home of swirling activity, a Great Lakes bay unseasonably warm enough to swim in impulsively with your clothes on, games around the dining room table and acceptance and twisty golden-green drives that put everything petty and frightening completely aside. I was asked for what I might like today and all I could come up with was cheap white bread for turkey sandwiches, a new can of whipped cream, and, if possible, the cryptic crossword. With love and peace already on your side, sometimes a new can of whipped cream really is enough.

And while in a few weeks I may yet be running around the house so eleventh-hour crazed that I’m making lists of things as basic as “eat food” and “brush your hair” in between scrambling to pack — I can’t for a minute imagine having regrets about how I’m spending my last days here, or how I have spent any day of the last 3,238 days in this country so far. Everything will get done in its way, because it just simply does. I for one am going to make a point of enjoying it.

1. spring
I always forget about spring. Seriously, it’s like you need to suspsend your belief in it during winter, because if you really knew, if you really remembered, it’d be completely torturous during the worst bleakest greyest sleetiest days of winter decline and despair. (It’s kind of the same as forgetting that there is love in the world, maybe — some days you just can’t handle that idea.) In any case I don’t know what the deal is with people who live in places without seasons — that cyclical mind game of forgetting and remembering (over and over your whole entire life) anchors the most inspiring and awakening and beautiful stuff in the world for me. I heard the ice cream truck yesterday, for god’s sake. Life is good.

2. arcane culinary geographical reference
Can I just say how much pleasure I take in coming off like some kind of old crank in a roadside bar whenever someone tells me where they’re from in the good ol’ United States? “Oh yeah? You’re from Albuquerque? Sure could use me one of those grilled cinnamon rolls from down at the Frontier Restaurant!” Hopefully it’s not too annoying, but I dearly love to be the local nutjob and random food go-to in any travel conversation. Of course, my knowledge is pretty obscure and limited to the 50 states and only a handful of Canadian provinces — but for now I can be content with wandering into a Brooklyn coffee shop and droppin’ some serious hometown taco and brunch-spot science on the transplanted baristas. Speaking of which, can somebody hook me up with a Montreal cannoli or a shot of Blue Bottle Roman espresso? Thanks!

1. spring
I always forget about spring. Seriously, it’s like you need to suspsend your belief in it during winter, because if you really knew, if you really remembered, it’d be completely torturous during the worst bleakest greyest sleetiest days of winter decline and despair. (It’s kind of the same as forgetting that there is love in the world, maybe — some days you just can’t handle that idea.) In any case I don’t know what the deal is with people who live in places without seasons — that cyclical mind game of forgetting and remembering (over and over your whole entire life) anchors the most inspiring and awakening and beautiful stuff in the world for me. I heard the ice cream truck yesterday, for god’s sake. Life is good.

2. arcane culinary geographical reference
Can I just say how much pleasure I take in coming off like some kind of old crank in a roadside bar whenever someone tells me where they’re from in the good ol’ United States? “Oh yeah? You’re from Albuquerque? Sure could use me one of those grilled cinnamon rolls from down at the Frontier Restaurant!” Hopefully it’s not too annoying, but I dearly love to be the local nutjob and random food go-to in any travel conversation. Of course, my knowledge is pretty obscure and limited to the 50 states and only a handful of Canadian provinces — but for now I can be content with wandering into a Brooklyn coffee shop and droppin’ some serious hometown taco and brunch-spot science on the transplanted baristas. Speaking of which, can somebody hook me up with a Montreal cannoli or a shot of Blue Bottle Roman espresso? Thanks!