I was determined to get a picture of the welcome sign to Indiana. I knew that there was one -- we saw an image of it last night at the Reds game, in the between-innings video game where the three cars race around Cincinnati (in New York, it's subway trains).
But I got nervous that I'd miss it behind all those semis, lumbering up the hills of southern Ohio, so Hugh shot this sign of the highway marker to Indianapolis. Then, a couple miles farther on, here came the Indiana sign:
Heh, heh, sorry it's so blurry. What do you expect out of the window of a speeding car? But doofus-y as it sounds, this sight actually made me want to sing "Back Home Again in Indiana," a song so quintessentially cornball you should have a straw boater and cane to sing it. (Don't worry, I refrained from treating my carload of family to such a cheesy performance.)
For me, this 24-hour blitz through Indianapolis was the most important part of this trip. I hadn't been back to my hometown for 18 years; this was long overdue. It was essential to let my children see this part of my life, to connect some images to the stories I'd been telling them. Even more, it was essential for me to remind myself where I've come from.
We're staying at a perfectly pleasant Homewood Suites out by Keystone in the Crossing, which was just a cornfield when I was growing up. I have absolutely no connection to the glossy chain-store agglomeration that has sprouted around this intersection. It could be anywhere in America. A Crate and Barrel? A Borders Books? A Bed Bath and Beyond? All very well and good, but utterly beside the point for me.
No, I was on a mission to show my kids every house that I ever lived in. Mind you, this is no quick task. My dad was a real-estate lawyer; we went to open houses every Sunday afternoon just for the fun of it; we were always getting enamored of some new home, some fresh yard, some better school district, some altered visions of ourselves. My family lived in 7 different houses during the 21 years I lived at home. Today we saw them all.
First came this little bungalow at 56th and Carrollton, where my parents were a young couple starting out, with just my toddler brother Holt and baby me. I have no memories of living here, although I walked by it many times in later years. All those fussy trees around the front are new (and by new I mean over the past 40 years). Even the big tree was barely more than a sapling when I first lived here.
When I was around three we moved to this place on Central Avenue, an exceedingly bland name for a beautiful street, lined with the sort of solid baronial homesteads that Indianapolis excels at. I do remember living here, when it was a modest little yellow dwelling with a screened porch across the front. (Holt's imaginary friend Heaps Cronin lived under the porch.) That dense screen of trees to the left wasn't there then -- I know because I was allowed to run by myself over to the neighbors' yard to have tea with Tina Gerlib and her mom. Mrs. Gerlib was Canadian, I think, which in Indiana qualifies you as an exotic.
Just before I entered kindergarten we moved to this house on Washington Boulevard. I remember this house in vivid and distinct detail. Of all the places we lived, this one has changed the least. Why would anyone change it? It's a splendid little house, with that copper-roofed bay window and the leaded-glass windows embellished with tiny crests and diamond-shaped panes. This is the house I "ran away" from one evening when I was four, scaring the bejeebers out of my poor mother (my dad was out of town). But I told her before I left that I was just going around the corner to Hammakers' Drugstore, where we went every day to buy candy. I put my shoes on myself (on the wrong feet, granted) and I had been memorizing the route for days. I was always good with directions.
When we lived in that house, I went to P.S. 70. I remember walking there every day, with older boys -- "traffic boys" with special white belts -- to help guide us little kids across the street. P.S. 70 always had a great carnival, and I had the best second grade teacher ever, Miss Pollack.
The next house was probably the best, a rambling 1920s-era manor on Meridian Street, the prime Indianapolis residential street, running straight as an arrow down the center of town. We moved here when I was just about to start second grade, which meant I had to be the new kid in school. Misery. But it was a fabulous house -- at last I had my own bedroom and didn't have to share with my annoying baby sister Buffie any more. (Hi Buff!) We had a back stairway and a dumb waiter and there was a balcony off my bedroom. A huge sunken garden in back, too. We renovated this house substantially inside -- at one point we had our old bathtub sitting on the front lawn for weeks. (I'll bet that was real popular with our Meridian Street neighbors.) The new owners haven't changed it much outside but they added these big bushes in front, so we had to drive up the driveway to get this shot. Sorry, folks!
Here's P.S. 84, where I went to grade school when we lived on Meridian. (We lived there for 7 years, so I finished grade school at #84 and then went on to Broad Ripple High School). The local Catholic school, Immaculate Heart of Mary, faced #84 on the other side of the street. John Hiatt went to Immaculate Heart; when I got from an autograph from him after a show one night, I mentioned that I'd gone to #84 and he laughed. "You were going to hell," he told me. "The nuns always told us those kids across the street were going to hell." Funny -- when we looked out our windows at Immaculate Heart, all we could see was a door flying open and some kid running for his life with a nun running behind, wimple flying, brandishing a ruler.
I tried to get a picture of Broad Ripple, but it's really hard to capture this tan brick hulk with an ordinary camera from the street. This was part of the fortress-like addition they built when I was there, adding lots of windowless interior classrooms where kids went stir-crazy. In movies, they always portray high school as a hormone-addled hell house of clueless teachers and vicious social competition, but for me it was paradise. The two things that mattered here were student publications and choral music -- talk about playing to my strengths! I apologize now to all the kids who oozed through 4 years at Ripple despising me for being a top student, multiple award-winner, and yearbook queen, with my magic Riparian hall pass that could get me out of any class. I don't remember asking for it -- after being ostracized in grade school for being in "special" (the gifted and talented class), it was astonishing in high school that being smart actually counted for something.
In a world of haves and have-not, in Ripple I was the ultimate have. Couldn't get a date, of course, but that seemed a fair trade-off to me; I had great friends to hang out with, anyway, and here is where we hung out. I knew I had to take the kids to Steak and Shake; best burgers ever. Of course, in high school, we never actually ate there, we just drove around the parking lot to see who else was there. One night Dave Crichlow and Tim Harmon and Beth Wood and I set out to do 500 laps around the parking lot -- the Steak and Shake 500. We probably only did about 20 laps before we realized nobody but us thought it was funny. But we thought it was hysterical.
House #4 (I told you there were a lot) was our brief experiment in building our own house. My mother designed this as a New England saltbox, in the middle of a new development that had been a cornfield not long before -- which meant it was way out in the new suburbs, and hence in another school district. (I got special permission to keep going to Broad Ripple.) The house was sage green when we lived there, but I like the new color scheme. I remember that this house's walls were so thin, they shook when the wind blew, as it often did across that flat bare tract. There were no trees at all on the lot when it was built. I'm relieved to see that they've finally grown in.
I was already in college when the fam moved to this place just off north College, in a development called Windcombe. It's been altered so much, I had to drive past three or four times before I was sure this was it. (It didn't help that my mother gave me the wrong address. Hi Mom!) They filled in the breezeway, converted the old garage, and built a new garage behind it. I guess my parents were beginning to downsize at this point, with two kids already off at college; I think they were also tired of living with their own construction mistakes in the new-built house. This place was solid, solid, solid. I don't think they were here long; I can't even remember what my bedroom looked like. I do remember that we were living here when we got our cats Nuki and Abby, and I remember Buffie's friend Sally Harvey lived across the street.
The last Indianapolis house I ever lived in: The house on East 70th, in Arden. My mother had been lusting to find a place in Arden for years. As it turns out, this was the house that Wally Dortch lived in when we were in high school together. I was ready to graduate from college when we moved here, but I do remember the interior very clearly -- a classic 1950s layout, mostly on one level, with a long wing of bedrooms. Tiny yard, but then, with grown kids, who needs a big yard? The house never felt small to us, but obviously later owners thought so because they added an entire new wing (the whole bit over the garage). The immense old tree that used to stand there toppled during a windstorm when we lived there, falling right between my parents' cars. We lived here when my brother got married -- I remember taking photos in the yard.So there's my Indianapolis life in houses. Bob asked me what there was to see in Indianapolis, and that's what I answered: Houses. But I'm not being facetious -- to me that's this city's great secret, its livability. People sink their money into roomy, handsome homes set on large lots -- for a city this size it has an incredible stock of them, on the North Side at least. (And to me, the North Side IS Indianapolis.) Yes, it has a beautiful downtown, which we drove around -- not much of a skyline, but impressive public plazas and mighty civic buildings made of gleaming Indiana limestone, all centered around the slender obelisk of the Monument. There are all sorts of new visitor attractions downtown, around the revitalized canal, which were developed long after I left town. But when I come to Indianapolis, what I need to do is to slake my lifelong hunger for looking at beautiful houses and wondering what's inside.
