There Are Places I Remember…

Dearest Rachel –

On my way home from walking with Lars the other day, I stopped at a bagel shop to pick up a dozen for Daniel and myself. Since I’d just eaten, it was clearly an act of nostalgia rather than actual hunger, because it was an outlet of a chain of such stores that I hadn’t seen in quite a while.

Now, there used to be one in the shopping center nearest to our house on Kirchhoff Road, and I used to pick up a dozen for us on my way home from the office back in the day from time to time, since they offered a wide variety of flavors – although, to be fair, we had our favorites, and didn’t really bother as much with most of the various options, restricting our purchases to as many of those certain types as we could get our hands on. That one, you’ll recall, closed down during the period of ‘fifteen days to slow the spread,’ complete with a sign on the door suggesting that they would return once the restrictions were lifted, which hung there for months thereafter. But they never did, and to this day, a ‘to let’ sign is posted on the vacancy left behind.

So, upon having spotted this place on my way home, I couldn’t resist. I let Daniel know what I was doing, and with his enthusiastic assent, got a bakers’ dozen (they were on sale for a special price on Wednesdays, just like back at the old place) and brought it home. All those carbs from trying to eat what we could while they were still fresh (you’d probably have wagged your finger at me for doing so, but I got rid of the bagel keepers as part of the purge. But with the place gone from our neighborhood, did I ever expect myself to get another dozen?) can’t be doing my diet regimen any favors, but it is so worth it, for the memories every bit as much as the flavor.

Covid, coming less than a year before your own departure (although having nothing in particular to do with it, apart from maybe trying to celebrate what little bit a freedom we had too vigorously (I think even that conclusion is a stretch), has contributed mightily to the fact that so many places that we used to frequent – and that I might somehow connect with ‘us’ much like I do so many songs – no longer exist. While it’s true that places come and go, as the Beatles observed early on in their arc…

…the speed of that disappearance seems to be so much faster than one might otherwise expect. Maybe it’s still the lingering effects of Covid, maybe it’s the fact that the economy is worse than it’s been in a long time, maybe it’s that our neighborhood itself is decaying, maybe it’s just that I’m paying attention when I wouldn’t otherwise, but it hasn’t even been a thousand days since you had to leave, and so many nearby places have all but vanished.

That little stretch of Kirchhoff, in particular, has seen a lot of departures in particular, even before you left. I think the Taco Bell was the first such loss; you would occasionally walk Chompers there of an early evening to meet me there. We’d pick up dinner from this, your favorite fast food place (and I don’t recall why it was so; it’s not like the Bell didn’t have an outlet in Macomb – although maybe that was from after you moved away from there, and in any event, your folks weren’t the type to ever do such places) and you two would hop in the car with me to drive the few blocks back to the house, where we would eat with Daniel before spending the rest of the evening doing whatever together. Of the four principals in this cute little routine – you, me, Chompers and the Bell – it never would have occurred to me that I would be the last one standing, or how soon that day would come.

A little further along the road, there’s an old-style Chicago-style diner that we would also pick up from – but it was a bit far to expect Chompers to walk to, to be honest, so while I think you might have gotten him there maybe once or twice, it was early on in our custodianship with him. Most of the time, it was just a typical pick-up place. Just this past month, when we got home from Japan, I went to grab something from there (as I wasn’t interested in where the boys were having me fetch something for them from), and found myself confronted with an empty parking lot around it, and a message of thanks to its many loyal local patrons:

Now, you can see that they claim they’ll be back after remodeling the place, but there’s no evidence of construction about the place. And after the bagel place hung that sign out, claiming that they, too, would be back – and what became of that alleged promise (although, when two weeks turned into the better part of a year, that’s not on them) – I’m not about to trust these assurances. I think we may have lost this, just one more piece of what used to be part of our neighborhood.

And it’s not just the neighborhood, it’s a bit of how we used to live. You’ll remember how we used to get a dozen or so bagels to take down to Kevin, back in the day, since there weren’t any decent Jewish bakeries or delis down in suburban Nashville. Now, there’s little point in heading down there anymore, what with him having joined you. That also means it’s likely going to be a long time before we ever visit another Waffle House, either; between the trips to the island and Kevin’s, we’re out of excuses to be anywhere near one of those, no matter how much Daniel might miss going there from time to time.

Yes, our landscape – and lifestyle – is looking less and less like the one you left behind, and the changes seem to be faster than I would have been expected. To be sure, some places have been dying a slow, lingering death that we could have seen coming from years back. The Sears at Woodfield has finally closed its doors for good, as one of the very last outlets of that once-mighty chain to do so. Now, in fairness, it’s not as if we patronized the place that often ourselves, but its absence (combined with the fact that the anchor at the opposite end of the mall, JCPenney, is also in the midst of its own death throes) leaves a gaping wound in a shopping mall that once sat in the Guinness book as the world’s largest, right here in our backyard. But some, like the Fratello’s disappearance, take you completely by surprise.

I was going to go on about another thing that may be about to disappear, and how it might look to you, but this letter is long enough, I’m short on time, and… let’s just say, it’s not exactly in our neighborhood. I’ll try and write you about it a little later, as it’s likely to last long enough to gather my thoughts about it, but not so long that I won’t outlive it.

Until then, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck; I’m going to need it.