A place built on dreams and affluence

I'm back in the Columbus suburbs, the place where I grew up. It’s been years since I’ve been here but how little it changes. New shops take the place of old ones, buildings that once were banks are now consignment shops. Anthony Thomas Chocolates and Rotolo’s pizza still landmarks on W. 5th Ave.

It’s as if time here has stood still, and I wonder how many residents see this too. This morning, to clear my head, I took a five-mile loop through my old neighborhood. I passed my best friend Lauren’s quaint tudor home and the “castle,” as we called it when we were kids. Even now it’s absolutely giant. Fronted by a U-shaped driveway, the stone home has diamond-paned windows.

This is Upper Arlington, the kind of neighborhood where sidewalks are plentiful and unmarred, where children ride their bikes and moms in spandex yoga pants push double-seat carriages under the shade of arched maple and black walnut trees. The real estate developers who founded it — brothers Ben and King Thompson — wants to name it the Country Club District. (They didn’t, but it’s still the kind of place where ladies lunch). 

In 1916 the national guard came in and set up a training camp on the ground that is now Jones Middle School to train servicemen to defend the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now it’s a place where yard signs show support for local city council members, where people buy bulk snacks at warehouse clubs (and fill their recycling bins with cardboard boxes of Lite Bite muffins and cereal). On my walk I passed road crews putting tax dollars to work and young men with mohawks and facial hair manicuring lawns before the morning frosts begin. I walked over an errant subscription card for "The Nation," the kind that always fall out of magazines when you bring them in from the mailbox. On the main street the fire station’s brass doors still gleam bright and lunch boxes decorate the fence surrounding the middle school’s track and field.

It is the community of Rom-Coms and dreams, and I imagined what must really go on behind the perfect sloping roofs and door wreaths showing support for the college football team. 

I also remembered all the good memories I’d had as a kid here. I can’t always remember the name of a person I interviewed last month, but I remembered with startling clarity, the names of my childhood friends, their homes, the layout of their family rooms. The home I lived in until I was 10 is more overgrown but otherwise unchanged. The house down the street where Jimmy, my first crush, lived has a new paint job. 

The memories collected and gathered strength and made me realize Ohio is probably a bigger part of me than I'm aware. It’s not just Columbus, but the state too. The old street bricks made in Hocking county, Zanesville and Lancaster and many other forgotten cities that show up now in news stories as the epicenters of the opioid epidemic. I see it somewhat differently, as I suspect many Ohioans do too. And I wonder, increasingly, if that’s not a story worth telling.