The Suburban Abyss

Are you the same person you used to be?

The question was posed in the October 2022 New Yorker article “Becoming You,” and it’s an easy one, perhaps an inevitable one, for a middle-aged person to ask while staring into the real or proverbial mirror. Especially after moving back to your place of birth after two decades away.

In “Becoming You,” writer Joshua Rothman explores the “continuity” of the self over the course of a lifetime and our individual perceptions of who we are. Some people feel they’re the “same” person they’ve always been, while others feel they’ve been a succession of “different selves.” Rothman refers to those in the “same” category as “continuers” – who see themselves as the steadfast central character in a single narrative – and those in the “different” category as “dividers” – who see themselves as the ever-morphing star of a series of short stories. Rothman cites a 50-year psychology study out of New Zealand, the results of which suggest humans are, by default, continuers possessing predetermined traits that, with a big assist from social conditioning, we lean into as we age; we settle into ourselves, in part, by responding to the world around us with actions that support the traits we exhibit from birth. Yet, the research also shows we are not necessarily stuck being the “same” – not locked inside an unwavering narrative of self – but capable of writing new stories with our lives – becoming “different” over and over again.

I understand and identify with both. In a fundamental sense, regarding my personality and temperament, I feel I’ve always been “me” – the same at 45 that I was at 5 and all points in between. But then I consider, for instance, the progression of high school me, college me and mid-twenties me, and I see three different people living three different lives that read less like chapters in a book and more like loosely-connected novellas; put all three mes in the same room, and at first glance the high school me may not recognize the mid-twenties me. Still, those three selves, however different, are all me and will always be a part of me, and I stay connected to each of them, in fulfilling and often bittersweet ways, to the extent one can mingle with their past lives in the absence of a time machine. Reconnecting with Northeast Ohio over the last three years, I’ve mingled more than ever. It’s hard to avoid, even for someone who has consciously not retraced his steps and who continues to relish the anonymity of his unfamiliar middle-aged face in a familiar world. I’m a new stranger on old streets, and it suits me just fine. Since graduating high school in 1996, I’ve barely stayed in touch with classmates and hometown acquaintances, and I’ve never been to a reunion – or, I should say, I didn’t go to the reunion. The Cuyahoga Falls High School Class of ’96 has held one official get-together in 27 years, a fitting denouement to the apathy we absorbed and often embraced as teenagers coming of age in the Nineties. This collective lack of initiative has relieved any pressure or obligation to engage, and anyway, the emotional treadmill of a high school reunion sounds like hell in a two-star banquet hall. Family and close friends aside, my reconnecting has been less about people than place, and more often than not, it comes in micro-bursts of sensory-induced nostalgia. I’ll get flooded with a sudden sensation – a certain scent in the air while walking in a certain season, a certain song on the radio while driving on a certain street – and it hurtles me down a highway of memory before I know where I’m going. The old/new surroundings of my past/present home provide infinite on-ramps to tangible memories and intangible emotions, and I’m an eager traveler back and forth across the divides. Nostalgia is about chasing a feeling, about revisiting or outright rescuing a lost version of yourself, and on rare and fleeting occasions I effectively step into my old skin. But usually I come close to getting there but not quite, and I frequently fall for the seductive deceit of time’s mirage.

Sometimes I miss the old versions of me, and by the “old” versions, of course, I mean the younger versions. Recently one night my mind drifted back to my first New Hampshire stint – the rutty bachelor period before Erica – and the cloak of emotional solitude that enshrouded me for 18 months in the White Mountains. Flipping through mental snapshots from this period, I was overcome by a deep melancholy for the raw richness of the experience, when the 23-year-old me purposely (and often painfully) reveled in what Hunter S. Thompson once called a “martyred feeling,” a “real fine late-night, many-cigarette, soft-lonely blues,” as he wrote to a friend when he was a young person occupying a similar perch. Then there’s the photo of preschool me standing on our back patio on 14th Street, wearing a yellow ringer tee and clutching an orange popsicle (my all-time favorite), the sun beaming down on my ruffled, blond bowl-cut mop, a big toothy smile on my face. Some days I feel so much like that happy little scruff it’s overwhelming; other days I feel so far removed from him it’s like looking at a stranger, and I wonder if I ever really was him. On particularly dark days, all I want to do is get a running start, leap inside that photo and be the bowl-cut orange-popsicle kid forever. Yet, I find myself in the midst of an internal shift, and a seismic one for me: more and more, the present is right where I want to be. I still pull my past lives off the shelf whenever I need them, but for the first time in decades, they’re starting to collect dust. Which is strange terrain for me, as for most of my life I’ve had a complicated relationship with the present, quick to reminisce about days gone by or wring my hands about the future instead of savoring the now. Maybe that means I’m finally content – or closer to contentment, at least – and contentment, as the saying goes, can breed complacency. Which is its own flavor of scary, and it’s certainly not orange.

Once or twice a year since moving back, I’ve driven by the 14th Street house to see what it would do to me and, admittedly, to see what the new owners have done to it. While the house is no longer the domain of our family, all of us – Mom, Dad, Travis, Joelle and me – still refer to it in conversation as “ours,” yet only in the past tense: “our old house,” “our childhood home,” etc. More and more, we simply refer to it as “14th Street.” Six years ago I had a big, blubbery man-cry when my parents revealed (via text video) that they were selling the house. It felt like the end of something, but I wasn’t sure what. With one of the few reliable constants in my life going away, I felt unmoored in a way I had never experienced. It took a few hours and a few beers for some clarity, and on the back end of all the tears and emotional vomit, I was left with the sober(ish) realization that my parents were indeed getting older and in fact very mortal, and they wouldn’t be around forever and nor would 14th Street – at least in the possessive sense that I knew it as “mine” and my family knew it as “ours” – and if I had yet to feel like a grownup at that point – and at 40 years old I most certainly did not – the news of the sale of my childhood home set me, unexpectedly and somewhat reluctantly, on an obstacle course toward something resembling a notarized adult. But time heals all wounds (or at least Band-Aids the boo-boos so we don’t pick at the scabs), and as it goes with these sorts of things, with each successive slow-creep drive-by past 14th Street, our old home looks less and less “ours” – just another house – and I’m no longer shedding tears over the tangible and intangible loss of the street address I acquired at birth. It doesn’t help that the new owners added a hokey covered porch to the front that wouldn’t look out of place as the entryway to Walt Disney World’s Country Bear Jamboree. (Or maybe it does help.) But even more absurd, as initially reported by our longtime neighbor Peggy and later confirmed on Google Earth, is the large slab of concrete now covering most of the back yard, leading to a new storage shed next to the two-car garage we built as a family some 30 years ago. Little of the grass where I played whiffle ball, ran through the sprinkler and built sad, soggy Midwestern snowmen remains. Less than a mile away, north across Portage Trail and down 13th Street, the land that Newberry Elementary School once occupied is now a regraded construction zone, the building bulldozed to make way for a new middle/high school campus. Upon completion in 2025, the three schools I attended as a kid – Newberry, Bolich Middle School and the original Falls High – will no longer exist.

Childhood is formative, but bumping into countless reminders of mine on a regular basis, I’m realizing a lot of it is disposable and forgettable, too. Hold on to 16 as long as you can? That sounds terrible. For all the memory triggers surrounding me, there’s so much I don’t remember, even when I’m holding a piece of the past in my hands. When our parents moved out of 14th Street in early 2018, Mom redistributed all the mementos she had collected and stored on our behalf, and Travis, Joelle and I were handed boxes of our stuff that we assumed had long been discarded. One of my boxes revealed roughly 40 volumes of the Sesame Street Book Club, a monthly mail order series that I absolutely cherished as a kid. I was reading at 3, and those Sesame Street books had a lot to do with it. I spent hours and hours alone reading and rereading them, but flipping through the books for the first time in four decades, only a few of the stories I vividly remembered, while the rest barely registered. Ditto the Senior Wills in the May/June 1996 edition of Falls High’s Tiger Times school newspaper I revisited last winter; I can’t place most of the references and inside jokes I wrote or were written to me in the wills, and I barely recognize the names and faces of most of my classmates. This same slow memory loss is starting to afflict my college years, too: My housemate Marcus, who was gifted with the memory of a dolphin, has told detailed remember-when stories that clearly involved me, but so many of them have gone missing inside my head – I have no recollection of the settings, the key characters, nothing. Recently it took me half a day to remember the maiden name of one of our close friends from school.

According to Science – and more specifically, Scientific American magazine – the human brain, in computing terms, accumulates a memory capacity of 2.5 million gigabytes over a lifetime, yet we have little control over what gets stored and what gets clicked and dragged into the trash bin. New information tends to replace the old, which explains why so many memories fade or disappear with the passage of time. Anyone who has crammed for a test or performed a rote task over and over again knows you can pummel your brain into retaining specific information – perhaps we could hold on to the finite details of our first memory were it as crucial to survival as remembering our way home – but the brain has a way of doing its own thing regardless of what you want it to do, especially when it comes to past experiences. We can look back and remember, in vague terms, the scenarios and sensations, but the details only get fuzzier as time throttles on. I love the golden endorphin rush of a nostalgia trip, but if we can’t truly go back, does it even matter how much we remember the tender trap of the past, if at all? Magnolia turned 15 over the summer and celebrated the birthday seeing Taylor Swift in Cincinnati. On the three-hour drive home Sunday morning, with Magnolia in full-on post-concert comedown mode, working through the can’t-believe-it’s-over blues, Erica and I reflected on our own formative concert experiences and the same happy/sad feelings we felt in their immediate wake. Erica, who maintains a very healthy relationship with the present, remarked that for all the concerts she has seen over the last 30 years, only fragments of memories remain from most of those shows, so the best we can do, she suggested, given the brain’s storage limitations, is try to live in the moment to its fullest extent. It’s cliched, but true.

The “moment” was front and center when Jason texted me on New Year’s Day 2023. An old friend and fellow 1996 Falls graduate, Jason has lived in Missoula, Montana, for most of his adult life, and before reconnecting at the August 2022 Blossom Phish show we had not seen each other in 27 years. Afterward, he mentioned he would be back in Ohio for the holidays, so we hatched plans to hang out and wrangle other Ninety-Sixers into a low-key meetup. Originally, this micro-reunion was supposed to take place between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, but with Jason’s flight to Cleveland delayed several days by winter weather, it ended up being January 2 – the night before Magnolia’s first day back to school after the holiday break. The responsible me was tempted to tap out, knowing the return of the alarm clock on the morning of January 3 would hit hard for everyone in our household even without a hangover, but for all I knew it could be another 27 years before I’d see Jason again, and the prospect of catching up with other friends for the first time in three decades was worth any suffering I’d experience the following morning. Movies are made about moments like this, and for once I did not turn down a starring role.

And while it may not have been worthy of the big screen, the night was memorable all the same. There were six of us Ninety-Sixers: Aaron, Craig, Jason, Kyle, Sean and me, along with Jason’s brother-in-law Mike (the younger brother of my freshman homecoming date Suzie) and one of his friends. Though none of us live in the Falls anymore, we assembled there by default, and our first stop was Barrio di Mario, a downtown basement bar at the western base of the Portage Trail bridge that previously housed a quote-unquote burlesque club. On this evening, a lethargic post-holiday Monday, the only entertainment was a pair of fully-dressed barflies belting out surprisingly solid karaoke versions of hits by the likes of Eagles and Journey. But otherwise, the bar was mostly ours, and it didn’t take long for us to immerse ourselves in the sorts of conversations that occur between friends and teammates who haven’t seen one another in half a lifetime – I started a thread with Sean by asking, for the lack of a better entry point, So how have the last 25 years of your life been?

A strange evening was swirling around us in the world of professional sports, but we were barely paying attention to the TVs above the bar until someone looked up and noticed a sobering scene on the football field, that of Damar Hamlin – who had suffered cardiac arrest after a hard blow to the chest – lying motionless on the ground, surrounded by a small army of medical personnel. One screen to the right, the Cavs’ Donovan Mitchell was swishing his way to history with a 71-point game in an epic come-from-behind overtime victory against the Bulls. This juxtaposition of imagery should have captivated us, and were it just another mid-winter Monday in our workaday lives, it’s likely we would have been home in our respective pajama pants and glued to our screens. Instead, we acknowledged what we saw – particularly the hushed tone of the Monday Night Football broadcast as the world held its breath waiting for Hamlin to regain his – then shook it off and returned to our conversations. Soon thereafter, perhaps sensing a change of scenery was in order, we decamped to Chelsea’s On the River, a longstanding Falls dive bar a mile down the street.

I’ve always preferred intimacy with my friendships, and with my experiences for that matter, and if there’s a guiding principle for both, or something resembling an overarching philosophy for this life and my interactions with others, it’s that I’m seeking something genuine. And for me that usually means small groups, even in big settings – I’d rather sit down for a deep one-on-one than work the room for obligatory surface chats. Inside Chelsea’s – the kind of place that will never not smell like cigarettes no matter how many years it’s been since the indoor smoking ban – we found a booth near the pool tables and settled in for more reminiscing. It was as close to a “Glory Days” moment as I’ve come, and sitting there swapping teenage tall tales I couldn’t not think of Travis, who years ago revealed that one of the driving forces behind his decision to move 2,000 miles west was to avoid the small-town shackles of a real-life Springsteen song. His version of the nightmare was spending every sad weekend on the same sad barstool at the Oakwood, recounting backseat conquests and gridiron glories with other sad ghosts from his past. And I didn’t want that either; if I kept driving these same streets, I feared I’d only get stuck in the ruts. More so than the Boss, Uncle Tupelo’s “Graveyard Shift,” with its “hometown, same town blues” and “same old walls closing in,” was a cautionary tale as I considered potential paths in my early twenties. Most music, for that matter, is a warning to the young: move on if you want to get your life moving, or never leave and languish. Cuyahoga Falls is a big part of my story, but it’s not the story, and it was evident I had to hit the road, a new road, to discover the different selves I knew were waiting around the bend. Still – though I’ve never listened to “Summer of ’69” and yearned for something I could no longer grasp – nostalgia has always charmed me, and back in the Falls amid the warmth of old friends on a glowing winter evening inside Chelsea’s, with “Runnin’ With the Devil” on the hi-fi and a tall beer mug in my hand, talking about the glory days felt damn good – all the heartland-rocker cliches be damned.

I resisted this kind of interaction for the longest time. I’m prone to finding elation in anonymity and equilibrium in solitude, and the shutdown at the start of the pandemic provided an all-too-convenient excuse to hide, as did our cross-country move to the suburbs and the prevailing hesitancy of pre-vaccination social life. I liked it all for the wrong reasons, and I liked it all way too much. This mindset is a slippery slope for a half-time introvert, as the health ramifications of the lone-wolf lifestyle are well documented: As cited in the 2021 Atlantic article “Goodbye Casual Friends,” a Brigham Young University study found that social isolation increases the risk of premature death from any cause by almost 30 percent. Males, in particular, are susceptible to death-by-isolation because we tend not to maintain friendships for the long haul or establish new ones as we age, whereas females excel at nurturing relationships for decades and making friends at every stage – if there’s a key reason women typically live longer, this may be it. I’m not lacking lifelong friends or new acquaintances, but even within deep friendships, I frequently question my loyalty. I think about the friendships I’ve let drift, ignored or outright destroyed, and how easily, how comfortably I’ve moved on from them. But then I spend time with friends I haven’t seen in months or years, or I sit around a backyard fire pit with new neighbors, and I’m left wanting more. And more and more in middle age, speaking of cliches, I’m realizing I have less time to burn than I did 20 years ago, and right now the life-is-short reminders are swarming like springtime cicadas: In the past 12 months, Erica and I have seen our Facebook feeds blow up with news of the death of a classmate, and in her case one of her best high school friends; over the summer, a close high school friend of Joelle’s, the first father among my blood brothers and a former Record Exchange coworker all died suddenly and unexpectedly. In middle age, I’ve found, it’s hard not to fixate on one’s impermanence even when you’re not swirling in a cyclone of premature death, and I’m not alone: The subject of aging, and various tributaries of it, occupied the majority of a three-hour phone call I had with Andrew on his 45th birthday; Marcus recently shared that a sudden, lucid realization of his mortality in the middle of the night left him sleeplessly staring at the ceiling.

The notion of my own expiration date has floated in and out of my brain – with wildly fluctuating levels of anxiety and acceptance – since I was 5 years old, but the irony of 45 is that I’m experiencing less existential dread now than at any other time in my life. Yes, some days I wake up a little creaky – physically or otherwise – and a little flummoxed that I’ve arrived at the presumed midpoint of my life, but it’s not so much feeling old as it is marveling at the steady accumulation of time that alternately slogs along and slips away in the wink of a young girl’s eye, and how far we can drift from ourselves and others, past and present; it’s remarkable the depth of intimacy we share with certain people who ultimately end up footnotes in our lives. But so it goes. We grow old, friendships fade, relationships fracture; people come and people go, and at some point we lose everyone, up to and including ourselves. It’s a fitting end when you consider that, no matter how deeply we connect with others along the way, we essentially live life alone – even in a crowded bar, even in the cradle of a lover’s arms – while we write our own stories as continuers or dividers or somewhere in between. More important to my story than remaining the same person or becoming a different person, is what kind of person I have been, and what kind of person I still can be. While most of the mementos my mother had kept for me have been redistributed to Goodwill and the landfill, I did hold on to one particular book from the Sesame Street stash. It’s called Fooled You, Bert!, and it’s basically Ernie tormenting Bert, page after page, until he finally gets his malcontent buddy to crack a smile. I laughed out loud reading it and looking at the meme-worthy illustrations of pissed-off Bert. I’ve always imagined myself – or even fashioned myself – as Ernie, but rereading the book, I realized my story is dotted with furrowed-brow moments where I’ve embodied Bert. And this realization didn’t make me happy. There are enough Berts in the world, perpetually shaking a fist at a real or proverbial cloud, and I don’t need to be one of them.

Midway through the holiday break, with Christmas Day in the rearview, Erica, Magnolia and I settled into our collective decompression from work and school, one of the few truly calm and quiet periods of the year for us as a family. We started by rewatching Into the Wild. Magnolia had just read Jon Krakauer’s book for the first time after seeing the film and expressed interest in watching it again to contrast and compare. In its own unconventional way, Into the Wild is a hero’s journey: a young person recognizing the trap of his life’s narrative – one largely written for him – and deciding to burn the script (often literally) and rewrite the story. It’s the moment Christopher McCandless rejected life as a continuer and embraced the divider he had always been, and it allowed him to emerge as Alexander Supertramp, which despite the way his story ended is nonetheless a triumph of the spirit. Whether you view his death as tragic, poetic or idiotic is immaterial; the important thing is, as Alexander Supertramp, he wrote his own story, on his own terms, to the end – however abruptly it came. Watching the movie again, we all cried at the end, because we always cry at the end. And every time I revisit the book or film, I take something new from the story, and this time, after nearly three years of leaning hard into my inner introvert, I was jolted by the four most powerful words in Christopher/Alexander’s journal: Happiness best when shared. We’re ultimately responsible for our own path, and we may in many ways walk it alone, but along the way, there are connections to make (and remake), relationships to serve and preserve and people to cherish like the air that flows in and out of our lungs until our last breath. And before I take mine, I just might leave the decommissioned bus of my mind, once and for all.

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