Home Gone Wild
Last Thursday night, I got a call from my dad just before 10:00 pm. We’d already talked on the phone for at least 20 minutes earlier in the day. Was there something he’d forgotten to tell me? I answered with a surprised, “Well, hi, what’s up?”
The purpose of the call was as specific as it was unexpected. “I don’t know what time Colbert comes on for you, but you should tape it if you can. Jim Gaffigan is going to be talking about Chesterton.”
I did “tape” the show (might as well make some use of that cable service I should have stopped paying for by now). But it would prove an unnecessary step. Not long into Friday morning, my friend Mary Kate had texted me a YouTube link to the segment, accompanied by no prologue, context, or comment. None was required. We’re both from Chesterton, Indiana. The significance of the moment was obvious.
I watched the video (of Gaffigan as the guest on Colbert’s “Community Calendar” segment, of which I’d been previously unaware). I then immediately forwarded it to a group of high school friends with whom I have a sporadic text thread that’s heavy on film and television recommendations.
Their reactions were mixed. One friend (who I believe reads this newsletter, hi Aaron) was, above all, disappointed with the way the audience laughed at the set-ups as much as the punchlines. And while I think his point was more about the production of the late-night TV in general than about the bit itself, it’s not hard (as a Chestertonian) to read a tinge of big-city condescension into these set-up titters. Is the very idea of a small town in Indiana having beachside yoga really that funny? Is it funny that a local community theater is performing the musical CLUE?
Having lived outside of the town for more of my life than I lived in it, and with a lot of attempts at comedy entertainment now under my belt…I honestly think the answer might be yes. Not funny in the sense of “worthy of ridicule,” but funny in the sense of “I’ve seen Schitt’s Creek, and this would be the perfect set up for some classic Rose-family shenanigans.”
On some level, it felt squirmy to hear some of the town’s nicest traditions get lambasted alongside the goofily-titled events of neighboring Michigan City or Hobart. But roasting Chesterton is something that anyone who grew up there has a LOT of experience with. Hearing our most famous native son — Gaffigan, whose entire comedy persona is largely one of self-burns — roast the town on national television was like having an inside joke go public. For me, it transcended the comedy continuum of hilarious-or-offensive. It was surreal.
As Mary Kate aptly put it in a later text, “Isn’t it wild?!”
One other thing that all the Chestertonians I’ve mentioned have in common with Jim Gaffigan: we left. Mary Kate sent the video to me in California from Maryland. Of the buddies I forwarded it to, the only one who still lives in Indiana is hours away in Indianapolis. One lives in Hawaii. One lives in Texas. Several of us no longer even have family ties to the town. And yet…I can’t speak for everyone else, but for me, hearing Chesterton discussed on The Late Show — at length — made me feel seen in a way that surprised me.
As I’ve written, my recent return to the Midwest brought me to all three of the Chicagoland1 locales I have called home. As I retraced my childhood steps, I crunched some numbers: My dad has lived in his current River North condo for longer than he lived in Chesterton. I lived in Hyde Park (on Chicago’s Southside) for more of my life than I lived in Chesterton, and in the city itself for twice as long. And yet, when I describe where I’m from2 it feels disingenuous to leave Chesterton out of the explanation.
In a way, I guess this is what a hometown is. It’s a place that, for better or worse, you feel partially described by. As a second-grader who’d lived her early life in a culturally diverse urban neighborhood, I arrived in Chesterton already with a tinge of that big-city skepticism. Over the next ten years I fantasized about my future constantly, and truly never imagined a future in which I stayed. My best friends and I complained constantly about how everything closed at 5pm and how frustrating it was that our favorite local hangout was, by default, the Antique Mall. But — I can see so clearly now — all of that bristling and dreaming and making do, those were ways that Chesterton was shaping me and the adult I’d become. Much as having things taken away from you can teach you what you care about, feeling penned up by small-town life guided my dreams for myself. And so, though I have no home or family there, and only a precious few friends, it’s not just memories of the past that tie me to the town. It’s a place that made me, and so I see myself in it.
When I visited Chesterton in June of this year, my friend Kevin picked me up at the train station and drove me around. Kevin is kind of a local celebrity, a people-person, father, and business owner. He and his family are true Chestertonians, the kind of curious, kind, multi-generational townspeople whose “staying” is relied upon by great towns anywhere on earth. I could write a whole chapter on the experience of seeing the town with them as my guides, of how it felt to watch a new generation of this family run and dance around the very places that I used to think of as my own (and some places that did not exist when we were young).
Those experiences were the unexpected bonuses of my visit. I arrived with only two real items on my agenda: see the dunes, and drive by my old house. The only house I’ve ever lived in, from age 8 to 18, the ten years that apparently make a place your home.
My dad sold the house in 2005. The last time I’d seen it was maybe 2012. Back then, I was behind the wheel of a borrowed car. I slowed to a stop in front of the mailbox, in disbelief: our family name was still there, a series of little black-on reflective white letters likely purchased at the hardware store on Calumet. The house hadn’t been abandoned, but whoever bought it hadn’t felt the need to claim the place as their own in that particular way. Now, nearly a decade later, I knew the mailbox would be updated — maybe not just the stickers, but the whole thing, a different color or a funny shape, maybe3. Hell, maybe the whole house would be a pile of clay and drywall. For some reason, I needed to see for myself. I needed to make peace with whatever changes had occurred.
But I was wrong. The house is still standing. It looks the same as ever. And the mailbox has changed, but not in the ways I’d assumed: it’s just rustier.
There, among the flecks of white paint and rusty steel, you can still read my name.
The phrase “Chicagoland Area” is a good example of the way something can seem unremarkable to a locals but hilarious to outsiders. No one from greater Chicago would bat an eye at the oft-use descriptor for the region. But in college, my Coastal friend Gabe thought the redundancy of “Chicagoland Area” was endlessly amusing. Of course, Gabe was the a geography major who spent a lot of free time in the Map Room at the research library.
tell anyone in LA you’re “from Chicago” and “what part?” is such a reliable follow-up question that it might as well be mandated
My dad and I recently drove down a street in Los Alamos, NM where every mailbox had a different metal animal sculpture on top.