Another Quiet Revolution

On December 18, 2018, most of our fellow passengers on Planet Earth woke up and did what they would do any other day of the year, completely unaware that December 18 is my birthday. In Tokyo, a bottle of red was uncorked in celebration of my thirty-third revolution around the sun.

This year, I saw rhinos in Kenya and bathed in rain showers in Thailand. I made tremendous progress as a climber, with only occasional injuries. Most importantly, I continued my journey of personal growth.

One thing that stands out from my year is how relate to my hometown in Indiana.

The first thing to say about Indiana is that it’s where I grew up, which is how a lot of people learn to hate a place. Indiana’s state motto is “Crossroads of America,” referring to all the highways and railways that provide passage to anywhere else but here. Indiana’s greatest economic achievement is being close to Chicago, which is why the top-left corner of the state adheres to a different time zone. Indiana’s state quarter is a race car because, sure, why not? The state’s other features include vast fields of corn monoculture, factory towns in various stages of deindustrialization, and long stretches of road.

And about the corn. For a few of my teenage years, I suffered from terrible seasonal allergies. The pollen and dirt and chemicals rural Indiana’s summer winds carry were like a poison to me, so leaving the state was a matter of literal survival.

After I left Indiana, my hometown became like a thought I had forgotten to write down. What was it again? In Japan, “Where is your hometown?” is a common entrée for conversation, and I tend to tell people I’m from Chicago — not because I’m ashamed of my state, but because it saves a lot of trouble. After a few years of saying I’m from Chicago, I started to believe it.

And now I’m 33.

When I went back this year, after staying so far away for so long, my hometown and the surrounding communities were mostly unchanged. Faded plastic playthings and broken cars still sit abandoned on so many lawns in those depopulated factory towns. Some stores had closed, some had new names, but Main Street was basically as I remembered it.

There’s a lot of good there, though. It’s in the mountain of a man who cleaned the ice off my rental car windshield when he and I were the only drivers waiting out a blizzard in a theater parking lot, an unprompted act of kindness for which he expected no thanks. It’s in the revelers at the local watering hole who invited me to join a birthday party. It’s in the genuinely beautiful country foliage that colors the sunlight red and orange in the fall.

What is a person supposed to do at age 33? One-third of a century isn’t really a long time. I guess at this point I’m supposed to have saved a massive sum of money for retirement. Maybe a lot of folks at my age have rewarding careers or, failing that, a child or three.

At this age, I’m content to keep learning about myself, a wandering soul from Chicago Indiana.