Hi cutiepie! What’s shakin’?
I went to Green Bay, Wisconsin last weekend.
So did around 200,000 other people. Those people were in town to watch the NFL Draft, which is when several hundred thousand rabid football fans gather together near a stadium to drink lukewarm $18 Miller Lites out of plastic cups, watch giant TV screens while standing up, and scream until their lungs give out when their preferred 19-year-old male athlete is chosen to do shovies and play catchies for their preferred football team while wearing not-at-all-gay tights.
It looks exactly like the TikToks I’ve seen of Bama Rush, and it is very! fun! to say that to men dressed head-to-toe in Packers gear who won’t stop talking at you about last year’s running back recruits.
I was in town to hang out with my friend Kelly. She lives in Seattle, but she was in Green Bay for the draft. I grew up in Green Bay (specifically Howard, a suburb of Green Bay), from ages 5-18, and I’ve known Kelly since we were six years old. Her parents still live in her childhood home, and she goes home regularly to see them.
My parents moved away from Green Bay right after I went to college. Within a year, all of my high school friends had moved away, too. There was never any reason for me to go back, and—as I spent all of high school talking about getting the hell out of Green Bay—I never went back.
Ever.
OK, I’d technically been back twice before this most recent visit, but the combined total of those drive-bys through Green Bay was less than 48 hours. They didn’t even count.
Suffice to say: It had been 24 years since I’d driven though the downtown of Howard, Wisconsin. 24 years since I’d driven past my old high school, past my dad’s old office building, and past the old roller rink, Wheels ‘N’ Motion, which is now an evangelical christian church!!! come on!!!
Howard looked basically the same, just with many more roundabouts, and I—the arrogant main character of my own life—couldn’t believe it was all still there. St. John’s, the Catholic church, whose congregants I believed (as a Mormon child) were all going to hell; the Burger Barn, now an Italian restaurant but still overtly shaped like a barn; the last free-standing Family Video in America, implausibly and incredibly with its lights still on inside.
There it all was. Driving slowly through Howard with my mouth open, my car suddenly a teal-and-purple Huffy bike ridden by the ghost of a tow-headed, barefoot kid in a matching shorts-set sewn by her mother, I remembered every house my friends had lived at, the bank where my mom took me to open my first checking account, the parking lot where I once saw a priest in his priest outfit drinking a beer. I remembered everything.
I cried. Big, open sobs. Very snotty, tears running down my face, just a grown-up lady weeping in her car in front of where Jubilee Foods used to be. Here was where my cousin and sister had taught me to parallel park. Here was the entrance to Meadowbrook Woods; I turned the car off and opened the windows, listening to the sound of the wind in the trees. Far off, I heard a dog’s collar jingling, and I closed my eyes, pretending for a second that it was my childhood dogs running, off-leash, to greet me; my mom’s footsteps heading down the path into the woods she’d loved.
I grew up, partially, at Kelly’s house—her parents, Chris and Janice, were always down to let me come over, and they were always warm and welcoming. Their house is where I learned that foods like “fish sticks” and “Peanut Butter Crunch” existed, and Janice took particular delight in letting me take whatever I wanted from her cupboards, which contained endlessly varying choices for food I had no access to at home.
It was at Kelly’s house—in her basement, on a low, hand-built balance beam—that I first realized I was maybe not going to go to the Olympics for gymnastics, after all. It was at Kelly’s house that I found out about a channel called MTV, and discovered that all the other girls in our class already knew how to dance because they were taping music videos and copying the dance moves at home. I went to my first boy-girl party at Kelly’s. (A disaster; the boys stayed on one side of the basement and the girls stayed on the other.) I went to my last childhood slumber party there.
And I stayed at Kelly’s house last weekend, and it was wonderful.
Kelly had sent me the address, but it turned out I didn’t need it; my brain still knew how to get there, and the house looked basically the same. The Busy Bee—the dusty gas station we used to walk to from Kelly’s house to buy expired candy at—was gone, but all other landmarks were where they had been a quarter-century ago.
Janice was waiting for me on the driveway. Beaming, she waved me in, and I parked, got out, and was immediately wrapped in an enormous hug. Janice!!! OMG, Janice!! She bustled me inside, trying to take all my bags from me and talk and find out if I’d eaten all at once. Inside, this was waiting for me:
Look at this.
Janice had made me a special welcome sign and put it in her kitchen. She used some kind of craft-thing and printed my initials on a football-shaped water bottle, and made one for Davin, who wasn’t even there. She had bought me the cereal she once watched me taste for the first time, and which she kept stocked for me, always, for all the years I took refuge in the normalcy and warmth of her house. There was almond milk, because now I don’t drink cow’s milk, and inside that football-shaped box, there was a mug with my name on it.
So much effort went into this!! So much care!! Here was an overture that took planning and thought and effort, and was made just for me, to make sure I felt welcome to visit a place I had not been in 24 years!
While I yelled about the welcome kit, Chris beckoned me over to a recliner in the living room, and together, we watched the draft and waited for Kelly to come home from Lambeau Field. Knowing, somehow, that not enough time could ever pass to make me care about football, and that I did not understand what we were looking at, Chris explained what was happening on the TV to me, and walked me through why everyone was so excited. While we watched, Janice ignored me saying I wasn’t hungry, made me an elaborate salad with a lot of dressing, and handed it to me, along with crackers, a napkin, and a glass of water with ice cubes in it. I ate the whole thing, plus an Easter egg-shaped fudge brownie, and Janice smiled smugly and took my dishes from me. Kelly came home and flopped in the other recliner, and Janice fussed about whether we each had enough blankets in case it got cold later, and I felt “home” on a level that is difficult to describe.
On Friday night, more than 10 of Kelly’s family members just casually came over, and we all hung out on folding chairs in the garage. I learned about the drama surrounding Kelly’s 10-year-old nephew’s crush, and I also learned, in great detail, about how one turns a regular garage floor into an epoxy garage floor. At one point, I discovered that I was sitting with four different women who’d seen me play Rizzo in Grease when I was 15 years old, and they all remembered it clearly. Kelly’s parents made me sign their copies of Moby Dyke, and yelled about how proud they were of me, and I turned very red and begged them to change the subject, and they would not.
Later, when the weekend ended and I was hugging Janice and Chris goodbye, I realized that they were the first parental figures in my life to tell me that they were proud of me since I had come out at 21 years old.
I had almost wiped Green Bay from my past. As a place, it only existed to me in little flashes of my memory. But it’s still there, almost all of it. And it felt good to go back to a place that formed me. Not just “a” place; the place. I’d been back to Chicago, to Seattle, to Minneapolis, all of them multiple times, but Green Bay was the Final Boss place. The one I’d never even attempted.
It can feel good, it turns out. Even if you go back late, and after lots of things have changed. Going back to a place—once you’re removed enough from it—can be healing.
Usually (at least in my case), you find out that it was the people in that place that formed you, really. It was never the house, or the Busy Bee, or the basement with a low, hand-built balance beam, or the wind rustling in the trees at Meadowbrook. What really formed you was a feeling that some people in that place gave you, like maybe you were OK just being yourself. Maybe you were welcome.
Maybe you were always welcome, at any time, to come home.
I was fine until the last two paragraphs and now I'm just crying in my office and hoping no one sees, augh. This was so, so good.
"imagine praying at the site of so much dry-humping". Incredible stuff.