Reuniting and Reminiscing: A Weekend of Looking Back

This weekend brought something that I had been anticipating for 5 years, and looking forward to for about 6 weeks. Because just about everyone my age is in the midst of trying to raise 2.3 healthy children with their heads screwed on straight, or trying to secure as much capital to sustain them in their Golden Years when Social Security has been cashed out by the politicians, nobody in my high school graduating class was interested in taking on the daunting task of organizing our 25-year class reunion.

But then, sometime in the middle of September I received a notice in an e-mail that we were having an informal, unofficial, hastily assembled reunion on November 10. WOO HOO!

It was held at a sports bar down in the same Chicago south suburb where we all attended high school, a bar which, as it turns out, is co-owned by one of our classmates!

I can’t even begin to describe the joy of seeing so many familiar faces, as well as some faces not so familiar until I read the name tags! There were a couple of people there who had missed the 10- and the 20-year reunions, so it was doubly fun to see them for the first time in 25 years.

As I now live approximately 55 miles from the town where I grew up, and I was certain that I would leave the venue at a late hour, and there was likely to be more than a little alcohol on my breath, I decided to make a weekend of it. I booked a hotel room in the area and planned to spend the night there after the reunion, and then to spend Sunday visiting my father, who is living in a nursing home.

And that’s just how it worked out, except I didn’t exactly spend the night in the hotel room, but more like the morning, as I didn’t get back into my room until a little past 3:30 a.m!

The good thing was that check-out time was noon, and a mere 30 steps away (give or take) from the hotel is a honkin’ huge Cracker Barrel Restaurant! Another good thing was that in eight hours of partying, I drank a grand total of three beers, so the only thing threatening my drive back to the hotel was fatigue…and the freak November thunderstorm that struck while I drove, and there wasn’t even a hint of hangover.

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I slept in just a little this morning, arising around 9:40am. Breakfast at Cracker Barrel was quick and yummy, and soon I was checked out and on the road to visit Dad. Since I was in another suburb a few miles west of where the reunion was held, I followed a different route than I usually would follow to get to Dad’s.

I’ve driven down Illinois Route 50 certainly hundreds of times throughout my life. And if I go far enough south, through and past the town of Monee (pronounced moe-NEE), heading toward Peotone (pronounced PEE-uh-TONE), my mind fires to life with childhood memories. Mom had an aunt and uncle who owned a farm just off of Route 50, where they raised pigs and chicken (and probably more, but all I remember are the pigs and chickens) and, during the summer, especially, Dad and Mom, just about once every two weeks, would throw two or three of us kids in the back seat, and we’d ride through just a little bit of country until we got to the farm. I’m sure Mom got the family discount on eggs, as we always returned home with about three-dozen!

If my life depended on it, I couldn’t find that farm again today…if it even still exists. I don’t remember which road it’s on from Route 50, or even how far to go along that road.

But there’s another memory along Route 50, one that is more precious and more vivid than any of the rides to the “egg farm.”

With Dad off on Mondays, he would often lift the burden of watching me on summer days from one of my siblings – as Mom had gone back to work – and take me with him on his errands and visits to friends around town. Every couple of weeks it was to Joliet, where he would get his hair cut by the barber under whom he had apprenticed. Other times it was off to the junkyard to drop off brass and copper he had scavenged or had collected from handyman jobs he had done for friends around town. Once in a while we picked up barber supplies.

But one particular Monday morning – I was around age eight or nine, my best guess – he said to me, “Let’s go fishin’.” I climbed into his blue Ford F-150 pickup truck and watched our little world go by as he worked through the gears of the “three on a tree” to get the truck up to speed and out to Illinois Route 50.

We hummed along the Route for a few minutes and then he pulled to the side of the four-lane road, essentially in the middle of farmland. I looked around and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Dad just said, “We’re here.”

I climbed down out of the truck and looked around. There was no lake or pond to be seen in any direction.

“We’re where?”

“Just follow me,” said Dad, and I did.

He grabbed the poles and handed me the can of earthworms we had picked up at a bait shop, and he led me away from the pavement and into the tall grass beside the road, down the embankment and into a small gulley, actually a dry creek bed that bent and ducked under the road. He pointed in the direction away from the road and said, “Through there.”

I looked to where he was pointing and saw what, to me at that time, was one of the coolest sights ever: a concrete spillway underneath a concrete arch bridge supporting the Illinois Central Railroad over the creek – only I didn’t know those things then. It was just the coolest thing!

“I hope there’s water back there,” he said as he ambled over the loose river rocks.

In the moment, I took him to mean that he had never been there before, and that we were both discovering it together. But since then, I realize it’s possible that he wasn’t sure if it was as dry back there as the creek bed where we stood. I followed him through the tunnel formed by the archway, over the smooth concrete floor. Out the other side I saw that there was a small pond and, at my feet, a ledge where I could sit and dangle my legs over the water while our bobbers stood sentry over our worms dying below, savage hooks rammed through their bodies, and drowning to add the final insult to their injury. The water was clear enough to see minnows and the occasional larger small fish swimming around near the shallows and near our ledge, so Dad was encouraged and confident we’d catch something.

Dad had even packed a lunch – his favorite, and sometimes mine – hard salami on buttered Italian bread.

We did catch a few fish that day, but they were all tiny and not worth taking home. We left empty-handed though not unhappy, but I unwittingly brought with me a memory I would have, it turns out, for a lifetime.

On Sunday, as I passed through the other side of Monee, those memories along Illinois Route 50 fired up again. I drove past what I thought might be the turnoff to the “egg farm,” and, as the landscape rolled under me, my surroundings told me I was close to that special spot to where Dad had brought me that fine summer day so long ago.

I had tried to find it once before, one summer day; I think heavy foliage on the side of the road had obscured it from view and, at 55 miles per hour…or faster…I just missed it. But today, since November has stripped the trees of their camouflage, after doubting such an idyllic spot could remain after so many years, I was able to spot the tunnel with ease!

I drove on past it, but nostalgia nagged at me to turn back, to gaze upon the archway, to take photos with the camera I had brought with me to capture reunion shots! So I did. I returned, finally, to the spot that has decorated my memories like cherished photos in an oft-opened shoebox.

I stood on the bridge that carries the cars over the creek, and I gazed upon the hole beneath the train tracks.










I was in no hurry. Dad didn’t know I was on my way to see him. Nothing else was on my agenda. So down the embankment I went!

The creek bed was dry – the past summer’s drought had probably kept it dry for months. I ambled over perhaps the very same individual rocks Dad’s and my shoes had touched those 35 years ago!








I walked through the tunnel and came out the other side and… it’s exactly the same! My educated and experienced eye updated my memory and I now understand that the pond where we caught and tossed back a handful of fish is actually a sort of flood basin. The embankment beyond the pond shows evidence of some quite fierce water flow where man -- long before Dad and I were there -- has manipulated the earth to forcibly divert the creek through the tunnel, under the rail bed, under the roadway, and off through the farmland. In the spring, this is probably a very dangerous place to be!





I don’t remember the strangely constructed pipeworks, evidently drainage from somewhere, and the water appears now to be quite filthy. I saw no fish swimming about. It could be contaminated by pollution, or it could just be that the pond spent too much time unrefreshed by rains and creek flow, and its population went extinct in the stagnant water.





But it’s still there! That idyllic spot from my memory exists relatively intact! Autumn has taken away most of the foliage, and today’s gray November sky painted everything in drab, but physically, the spot is exactly as I remember it.

I drove on to visit Dad at the nursing home. He’s 84 now. His condition may not have worsened, but he certainly hasn’t improved. His mind is still pretty sharp, but he doesn’t recall the day he took me fishing in that secret, special spot so many years back, not even after I showed him the photos.

I’m neither surprised nor upset that he doesn’t remember it, or that it didn’t resonate with him as such a monumentally special, memorable moment with his youngest child. That day I think he just wanted to catch some fish!

The funny part of it all is that I can’t stand fishing. I’ve always hated it.

But I love my dad. And that day was a perfect, golden, special time for me, with him.