At 3 p.m. sharp, my dad would meet me in the school lobby at 112th street in between Riverside and Broadway. He would grab my bag and I would take his bike (the handlebars laughably high above my head). There was at a deli on 111th and Broadway called Samaad’s (most likely named after the owner). My dad would hand me two dollars and tell me to “go crazy.” Every day, I would get a lemon poppy seed muffin. These were no normal lemon poppy seed muffins (not that such a thing exists). These were warm like they had just come out of the oven. The lemony smell always left a stamp on the air and the butter from the top would leave marks on my jeans. I could never finish without getting the poppy seeds stuck in my teeth. I would spend the whole rest of the way home trying to pick them out.

The man at the register had a unibrow and a crooked-toothed smile that he always flashed just a little too wide so that you could tell it was a fake. Maintaining his cool was no small feet considering that every weekday around 3:15 p.m., Samaad’s was packed with children. There were only two aisles in the store separated by a giant coffee bar. Every spare inch would be taken up by backpacks and screaming. Kids would knock each other over to get to the last Odwalla juice or Lindt chocolate (my first encounter with the New York hostility most commonly seen on subway platforms). My dad would wait (with about fifteen other parents) patiently outside the store for me. When I came out, he would nod knowingly at my muffin. He would pull out his pocket knife and cut it carefully down the middle. Then, just to be fair, he would let me pick which half I wanted.

There was a small triangle of grass in between 106 and 107th streets that I liked to pretend was a real park. There were trees and the odd flower, but the focus of the triangle was a statue of a woman named Ida Strauss. Evidently, she refused to board her lifeboat on the Titanic when the crew wouldn’t let her husband on. I didn’t learn this until seventh grade. What I really cared about was how much fun it was to put my small feet in one of the pockets of her dress and hoist myself up to the top of her head. I would swing my legs around her neck and bend upside down. My dad would smirk and watch as he finished what I’d left of my muffin half. The best thing about the statue was that someone (I never found out who) would leave a few pennies in a fold of her dress. Every time we walked by, I would become maybe four cents richer, but to me the statue was a gold mine.

There was a video store on 105th in between Amsterdam and Broadway that never displayed the actual movie cases. Instead, they filled boxes stacked up to the ceiling with 3×5 note cards with only the titles printed on them. You would have to bring the title up to the desk. I remember when we first started going there that my head was too little to see the man behind the counter. It was magic. They were always playing a 80s comedy on some tiny TV near the doorway. While I would search through the musicals section, my dad would stand close to the screen and laugh uproariously. When I was a really young, I didn’t notice. Once I turned ten, I was embarrassed.

On 97th and Broadway, there was a homeless man who claimed to be a New York Times published poet. He would sit outside with a folding table and chair, and proudly display laminated (taped) copies of all the poems he’d written. Some were about his life, how he wound up homeless, others were about the city and how it feels to sleep on a step; the craziest ones were about Jesus. One time, for a school project, my friend and I took his photo. He told us about how he moved from San Francisco in the 90s, and how he won the science fair in seventh grade. Then he asked for $5. When I got home, my dad was furious that we’d objectified hi, “as if the homeless in this country don’t have enough of a problem.” It was one of our first real fights.

Jake’s Fish Store used to stink up all of 89th street. Then I think the Health Department shut it down. Next to it was Murray’s, a shoe-box-sized shop that made the best potato knishes. They were always best toasted the next morning for breakfast. When I was five, I accidentally spilled a whole barrel of coffee beans at Broadway Farms on 84th street. I remember the incident particularly well because some guy yelled at me and I was a goody-goody. The next day, they put up a sign that said “PLEASE KEEP CHILDREN AWAY FROM COFFEE BEANS.” That sign is still there and to this day I feel queasy and embarrassed when I see it. Then, two heavy glass doors, one doorman, one elevator man, and eight stories later there was home.

My dad and I took this walk home every weekday for all of elementary school. Even though I switched schools when I was thirteen, these thirty blocks represent what New York is to me. It is stability. It is how, even when my dad moved out and half my things were put into boxes, they were baking lemon poppy seed muffins at Samaad’s. It’s how, when I switched schools, the man on 97th street was still laminating his poems. How when my aunt got hit by a car, we came back from the hospital and heated up knish from Murrays. My history is intertwined with my neighborhood. Each store, every corner reminds me of a story or a time. New York is something in my life that I know can never completely change. Sure, the movie place closed two years ago and my walk home has changed, but the basic attitude—the way it functions—will always exist.

Before I left for Northwestern, my dad and I re-took our walk. It was the first time in a few months but nothing had really changed. We walked past Samaad’s and I laughed at the kids fighting over Odwalla. I found the pennies in Ida Strauss’s dress. I didn’t buy a muffin, though. And I didn’t take the pennies — I left them for some kid. Since this walk basically defines my first thirteen years, it makes me realize how lucky I am to no longer be a thirteen-year-old. It reminds me of how much I’ve changed. How I can hold my dad’s bike in one hand; how soon he might not be able to ride it. We must have crossed these thirty blocks a thousand times, and still, each time makes me nostalgic for the last.

Though there are many things that I miss that remind me that I was in the largest city in America (trying to find duck livers in Chinatown, weekly trips to the Met), the bulk of my New York memories happened between Columbia and Lincoln Center, Central Park and the Hudson River. My favorite thing about New York is that with about eight million people, three hundred square miles, and maybe a hundred different languages, I can still clearly picture every store-front on my way home.

This question, beaten to a bloody pulp in the countless introductions of New Student Week (and beyond), is one that never fails to both amuse and annoy me. While I understand its social purpose, since grasping for an appropriate conversational starting point after that initial name exchange can be terrifying, using geographic location in an attempt to find common bonds strikes me as arbitrary and shallow. I’d rather be asked about my major for the twelve-thousandth time than face the anticipatory judgments associated with zip code.

But perhaps I’m being a little harsh. One of the main reasons I’m so reluctant to answer the hometown question stems from my lack of identity with the place that currently hosts my mailing address. Growing up in Chicago, in the area known as Wrigleyville, I could not have been more devastated than when my parents told my brother and me that our family was moving out of the city and into the hinterlands of Northern Michigan. It seemed my father had always harbored a secret desire to escape the crowded city streets and retire to the place where he’d spent many fond childhood summers.

The unadulterated look of alarm on my face must have inspired enough panic in my parents that they then fired back with several outlandish promises that would allegedly ease the transition of the move. My mother tried to comfort me with assurances of horseback riding in the country and camping on the weekends, both of which scared the shit out of me. I considered myself a true city kid at heart: a foul-mouthed, street-savvy, organic-food-buying city kid, and I was not willing to negotiate a forced Diaspora.

Grudgingly, I went along with it, realizing that I had no other choice and could only make the best of what seemed to me an apocalyptic situation. I was 15 years old when my family moved from the city to Petoskey, Michigan, a hamlet of merely 6,080 inhabitants. I stomached my inherent city snobbery and delved into what I hoped would make me a well-rounded individual, or at least afford me the opportunity of interacting with Republicans. While I obviously held unfair prejudices toward the town I knew little about, for some reason these only seemed to intensify in the initial period of the move. I couldn’t help but compare the dinky little town of Petoskey with the grandeur of Chicago, which at the time I had romanticized into a sort of warped Shangri-La.

Consumed by nostalgia, everything about my new home was a glaring reminder of what I no longer had. The playground of my elementary school in Chicago had a view of the John Hancock skyscraper. My new high school instead stared out at stretches of farmland and herds of cattle, who became unwitting audiences to the spectacle of my gym class. Memories of the bustle and energy of Chicago streets were not easily replaced by lakefront lighthouses and the charm of the local Wal-Mart. The scenery of Northern Michigan is so undeniably beautiful that even Kid Rock wrote a Billboard-charting anthem dedicated to its mystique. And yet, there I was, refusing to acknowledge its attraction.

Instead of remaining an aloof outsider to the tightly knit, mostly homogenous community, I grew fond of some of the things I thought I’d hate most. The idea I had of Northern Michigan, a haven for buck hunters and Sarah Palin fan-club members, was a total exaggeration of tiny pockets of the community. And it was refreshing to hear so many different political viewpoints, because as much as I disagreed with them, I rarely even heard them living in a city with a predominantly liberal bias.

The naïveté about city life that I thought would characterize most of my classmates was matched with my own lack of understanding about rural life. Sure, several people asked if I’d ever seen a drive-by shooting or gotten mugged, but I also had no idea what an ATV was, or the significance of November 15th, the sacred day of the start of firearm hunting season. I also grew to appreciate the size of the town, something I feared would suffocate me. While Chicago’s large size encourages the loneliness of anonymity, almost every face was friendly and recognizable while walking around Petoskey. I smiled every time I saw the “local celebrities” of Petoskey, one of whom draped a large Confederate flag off the back of his pickup truck, while another was simply known by the delightful moniker of “Beej Man”. These colorful personalities, while amusing as anecdotes, are not representative of Petoskey as a whole. I’ve made wonderful friends who had none of the negative “small-town” characteristics I presumed they would. Letting go of my snobbishness allowed me to give Northern Michigan the chance it deserved, and see that even though the differences were huge, they weren’t necessarily terrible.

Coming back to the Chicagoland area for college, I was still a bit perplexed about how to answer the question of where I was from. At school I’ve found many others who share this hometown conundrum. Several friends of mine have lived nomadic existences and now cringe at the prospect of picking just one of them. My situation was a more radical change than most, and as cheesy as it sounds to say, I feel that moving made me a better person. I abandoned my preconceptions about life in small towns and discovered that the experience of living in Petoskey was nowhere near as hellish as I had predicted.

But since I do still hold a strong connection to the place where I spent the majority of my life growing up, I’ve found myself falling back on the comfort of naming Chicago as my hometown. And if a deeper biography needs to be fleshed out, I’m no longer reluctant to own up to the fact that my “other hometown” is a largely unheard-of Northern Michigan town. In fact, I kind of like it.

One day, my parents regretfully told me that the hardware store had burned down. Next door, a restaurant’s deep fryer had gone awry, and the ensuing blaze obliterated both the greasy spoon and the Ping-Pong repository. I remember going to see what remained of the site. A bulldozer sat beside the blackened and partially collapsed frame of the hardware store, and my father pointed to the open lot where the offending eatery used to stand.

As time went by, the disappointment of losing a ready supply of Ping-Pong balls faded. I found new objects, like coins and Hot Wheels cars, to drop through the vents into safekeeping. The burned-out stretch of the thoroughfare near my house was rebuilt, as a branch of Milwaukee’s local bookstore chain Schwartz moved in. Soon after, the time came for formal education, and my parents marched me off to elementary school to begin kindergarten.

My hometown of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, sits peacefully along the Lake Michigan shoreline. In the 19th century, the village was founded as a lakeside amusement park, separated from downtown Milwaukee by a few miles of forest and farmland. Pleasure-seekers would ride ferryboats from the city to a pier below the fifty-foot bluffs for days of swimming, eating and carnival rides. Today, Whitefish Bay is a residential community, devoid of industry and without commercial activity greater than the local shops. Middle to upper-class families like mine live along quiet streets in multistory houses, a few blocks of apartments or the mansions along the lake shore.

The community has long been well-kept and well-to-do. It is anchored by the public school system, which draws in young families and unites them in the collective exercise of cultivating the next generation. My parents chose the town in part to give my brothers and me a first-rate education. High taxes, ample parental involvement and a goal of excellence make the local schools among the most highly-rated in a state proud of its educational ideals.

Of course, many kids going through the schools could not have cared less about a culture of excellence. Relatively rich and frequently bored, some would spend many hours crawling the run-down mall on the edge of town. Though most people lived within a fifteen-minute walk of the high school, the surrounding blocks were always packed with nice cars on school days. Most of us took multiple AP classes and applied to numerous colleges, simply because we were expected to do so. The more adventurous would drink, smoke and occasionally get into fist-fights in the JCC parking lot with those douchebags from the next high school over. Such antics tended to be quickly dispelled, however, as the overbuilt police usually had little to do beyond directing parade traffic and investigating bicycle theft.

Idyllically suburban and somewhat suffocating, the family-oriented community provides a mundane stasis to residents. Kids like me grow up playing in sprinklers and throwing baseballs; high school football games provide first-date opportunities and bring out the village’s multi-generational families in their varsity letter jackets. The trappings of wealth are quietly manifest, too — professional parents work in downtown high-rises, build backyard swimming pools and fly far away with their kids for vacation. Yet the town sits only a few miles away from some of the toughest neighborhoods in Milwaukee, where shootings are common and voucher programs were invented to address failing schools. The loss of high-paying industrial jobs has contributed to the decline of those areas over the past few decades.

Though our well-groomed corner of town escaped similar difficulty, it is not immune to change: People’s political leanings have evolved, foreign language has come to the elementary schools and new families, as always, move in. Recently, following the death of its founder, Schwartz Bookstores closed down after decades of business. Talk had circulated about new owners running the store independently, but the chance for a brick-and-mortar establishment to flourish seems small in the age of Amazon. The bookstore has been completely stripped, leaving the dusty windows dark; as a matter of convenience, the local literati have been required to take their book signings elsewhere, and to read 1984 on their Kindles.

The site of the hardware store sits empty once again. Its life in my neighborhood reflects my life there — the coming and going of the bookstore dovetails the beginning and end of a chapter of my own. As gradual tinkering consigns more things to memory, the interesting question is, as always, what comes next. Somewhere in my hometown a couple is preparing to send their child to kindergarten, having taken the place of a couple whose children have all moved out. The newcomers might be pondering things as large as education policy or as small as a Ping-Pong ball. Their child will grow up, and bequeathed a legacy he cannot fully appreciate, someday he too will step out to find the world.

It is a privilege to hate my hometown of Bellevue, Washington.

Don’t get me wrong — I feel lucky to have been graced by some cosmic lottery to be born in such an affluent American suburb. Yet, as content as I am for my family to afford to send me to Northwestern, I hate the culture my background entails. As long as I pretend those exorbitant North Shore mansions north of Central don’t exist, Evanston seems like a modest man in comparison to Bellevue, which I’d relate as a businessman lounging in a Masarati. However, as much as I dislike Bellevue, I cannot readily reject the city that taught me everything — that would be the easy attitude to hold against my high-end suburban hometown. Instead, I thank everything about Bellevue for forcing me to see beyond its wannabe glitz and glamor and multimillion dollar estates and views. And while that was all great for some time and some reason, I hope never to return.

Original, I know. To hate one’s own suburban hometown — why don’t I just jump on the next closest bandwagon already?

Yet, imagine living across the street from a barely-breathing, barely-there Stepford wife. Imagine driving to a local high school only to realize you feel incredibly inferior in your Toyota because the parking lot is full of BMW’s, Lexuses and Land Rovers. Imagine going out to “Downtown Bellevue” and seeing a woman badly burnt from a poor tanning salon, with stark, platinum bleached blond hair toting a small dog in a designer bag and having no surprising qualms with this appearance. Imagine learning about Juicy Couture when you were 10 years old; even I can barely imagine my parents’ face when I came home and told them all about it.

Driving into downtown Bellevue on I-405, the city’s very own modern waterway that streams seemingly naturally down Wilburton Hill into the dense commercial district, one is immediately shadowed by cranes and skyscrapers. For a city of approximately 200,000, there seems to be a one skyscraper for every 10 citizens. And despite all of its developers’ efforts, Bellevue is only barely a miniature version of the skyscraper carved and etched Seattle skyline across Lake Washington. Real estate agents force office buildings and apartments into the 15×15 block downtown with the same nonchalance I have piling food on my plate at 1835 Hinman.

The one thing that is fantastic about Bellevue and its citizens is that the taxpaying public is ridiculously generous when it comes to public schooling. Late superintendent and former local celebrity Mike Riley pushed intensely for public education to prepare all students for higher education (because as in Prairie Home Companion, everyone in Bellevue is above average and college is the only post-high school option.) Somewhere through the cracks of establishing picture-perfect, movie-worthy high schools a la East High, the Bellevue School District funded my alternative 6-12 grade, 500-person school with tax dollars. The International School was, and continues to be, an eclectic anomaly that stands out as strangely in Bellevue as the lone thrift store within the Bellevue Collection, the city’s massive, three-building shopping conglomerate advertised as the Pacific Northwest’s premiere shopping destination.

All through middle and high school, I partially resented the International School (IS) for making me feel less and less a part of the Bellevue norm and more a part of strange Bellevue subculture. In middle school, it seemed I never developed the same interests as the majority of my peers: I hated going to Bellevue Square, simply known as “the mall,” where I felt constantly judged by its haute couture patrons, nor could I keep a conversation with many of my peers past three minutes, especially when talk of the latest MTV show came up. Since it seemed so much of the Bellevue norm was defined and determined by the material I was inherently disinterested in, I felt alienated in my own city as I passed through adolescence. I don’t dare to be announce myself to be above materialism, but I am simply not interested in the same material Bellevue flamboyantly glorifies and values.

So while half of the time spent at IS helped foster this feeling of cultural isolation, during the other half of the time, IS was one of the few places within city limits I genuinely felt accepted and normal. At a school where students referred to teachers by their first names, protested standardization and walked off-campus to catch the breeze of people getting blazed, I felt at ease.

The subculture I grew attached to in high school represented a small, but increasingly growing group of youth that flee Bellevue’s Stepford mentality by attempting to imitate the once-hippie lifestyles of our tempered parents. After school, I regularly flocked to a friend’s house in the epicenter of downtown Bellevue. In the shadow of one of Bellevue’s skyscrapers, we graffitied a shed from Home Depot her parents bought on a whim and nicknamed it “The Cabin,” all while chickens ran around her house (these parents in particular were really into a type of urban farming of sorts). Next door, a 5,000-square-foot mansion complete with a gated entrance and fountain remains empty for the majority of the year — it is a foreign businessman’s “summer house.”

And IS was no ordinary secondary school. By high school, most of my peers looking for a “traditional high school experience” left, leaving the IS student body a strange, awkward, diverse group of students, which attracted equally unique teachers. Instead of following curriculum guidelines, teachers spent periods going on and on about Ayn Rand, a personal admiration of Dutch porcelain, Kierkegaard and their own personal life histories. Over these hours, I garnered an education far beyond what any regimental high school could offer. I never quite learned what a fallacy is or anything beyond the concept of a “mole” in chemistry, but from my teachers I learned what it means to introspect everything, always question authority and how important it is to leave Bellevue.

As a result, I have many thanks for the city I detest: Thank you, Bellevue, for giving me the cultural boot and forcing me to find something better and greater than Bellevue Way. Thank you for encouraging the search of escape routes from the city’s unforgiving societal structure. Thank you for the generous school system that got to me to where I am today. Without Bellevue, I would never be here at Northwestern. I could never have gotten here academically, nor would I have ever generated such an eagerness to leave home. So thank you Bellevue, but good-bye; it’s been a privilege.

If you’ve ever been to Paris, the name might ring a bell.

“Ce train est en direction de Poissy. Il desservira toutes les gares,” the crackling loudspeaker would say, as the doors of the dirty train close before lurching onward.

In the tangled mess that is a map of the Parisian public transit system, the red RER A line emerges from the lot, stretching its limbs westward until one of its final destinations : Poissy (pronounced “Pwa-see”), innocuous suburban town in the shadow of the City of Lights. The place I’ve thoughtlessly called home for fifteen years.

It is hard to explain how Parisian suburbs differ from the cookie-cutter American ones with their strip malls, neatly-trimmed lawns and SUVs parked in the driveway. People here expect a charming place, something akin to the small provincial town seen in Beauty and the Beast. But Poissy, like many other medium-sized towns in the area, suffers from a sort of split personality disorder.

On one side, we have the city center, with stores you only browse through once and the market where you can buy fresh produce and counterfeit shoes three times a week. On the city square, an old two-story carousel looks over skateboarding teenagers, and once a year, if you’re lucky, a pseudo-celebrity inaugurates the ice-skating rink. A semi-historical town, it saw the birth of King Louis IX in 1214 and the shooting of a John Travolta movie last December, but not much in between.

On the other, we have the kind of neighborhood you might have heard of in the news, where families are stacked on top of one another in tall affordable housing buildings, with hideous patterns of white, pink and black tiles, and where people sometimes burn cars to express their frustration. A city with a a small settlement of Roms camping on its outskirts that people look at warily. A city with a high security prison that I would hear about when watching late night shows about serial killers.

Despite having spent most of my life there, Poissy had never been much more than a flat backdrop to my existence. My high school being in a nearby town, Poissy only became a place of transit, just like for the many people who jumped on the RER train to head to Paris. The Poissy I knew was dreary. I saw no charm in its cobblestone streets and neatly-aligned bookstores and butcher shops, prefering to catch the next train to excitement in the capital. Poissy was a boring, lifeless acquaintance of a town, one that I didn’t particularly want to get to know better.

It took me a while to discover a more exciting side of my hometown, and oddly enough, it was only after I had left for college thousands of miles away.

It was an odd summer in 2008. I had a rather well-paying job, but the irregular working hours had turned me into somewhat of an insomniac. Some days, I would leave my home before the sun got up to take the first morning train; others, I would walk down the city streets at two in the morning; and sometimes, I would work all night and go to bed as the rest of the world drank their morning coffee. Yet somehow, it was only in these strange hours that I felt my town come to life.

When I walked alone in the dead of night, Poissy suddenly became thrilling. How eerie the carousel looked in the darkness, the ornate horses frozen in time, as bats fluttered from tree to tree overhead.

The marketplace became a delightful ghost town at the crack of dawn, when only a handful of merchants were propping up the gray metal pipes to hold together their fruit and vegetable stands, and I could already sniff the warm odor of baguettes emanating from the closest bakery. Yet, only a few hours later during the day, the colors, sounds and smells would become so much more vivid after a sleepless night, as I would stare in a daze at the strangers stirring their small café noisette on café terraces.

I also came to enjoy the endless stretch of concrete road cutting a straight line across the neighboring forest, when late nights out with friends in the closest town did not end late enough for the first bus to spare us the walk through the woods as the sun rose.

It’s funny how the places I had looked over dismissively for years suddenly gave me chills in those deserted hours, leaving me feeling like I was intruding on something no one had ever seen before. I could hold my breath on the walk home from the train station and only hear my footsteps on the cobblestones, or the occasional shout-out from someone on a balcony with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, both of us surprised to see another human being at this hour.

After a while, my walks to and from places across town became not just about the train I had to catch or the moment where I could curl up under the covers. Poissy might never really be a destination, but I had come to enjoy the itinerary.

Every spring, from third through fifth grade, I would race to the kitchen each morning and tear through the paper in hopes of finding out that the Medallion Hunt had begun. Finally, on one glorious Monday every year, after flipping the Wichita Eagle open to page 1A of the Local & State section, I’d find the four-line rhyming clue I had waited for so patiently.

Once the clues started showing up in the paper — one a day, for two weeks — my friend Amy and I staked claim to a table in the cafeteria, laid them out and pored over them, one at a time, looking for patterns and rhythms and anything that may lead us to the prize. The rules were simple: Officials hid a small, golden medallion somewhere within city limits, on public property. Using only the clues and their mental prowess, readers were to deduce the location and find the medallion. The first to bring the medallion to the Wichita Eagle offices won $3,000, money Amy and I were determined to win.

We never found the medallion. But not for lack of trying. One afternoon, swearing I’d decoded the riddle, my mother drove me south to a tiny, ill-kept park. I gave up after an hour of searching, visions of dancing with Cinderella and riding Space Mountain popping like bubbles in my 10-year-old head. A few days later a man found the medallion close to where I’d been, hidden in a Barney coin purse.

Even though I never found the medallion, the hunt served only as a lead-in to the Greatest Event of the Year — the Wichita River Festival. For nine days, almost 400,000 people gathered in downtown Wichita, crossing the Douglas St. bridge to attend the carnival on the other side, and laying in the grass beside the Arkansas River. Most only attend the first day of the Festival (the Sundown Parade) and the last (fireworks over the Arkansas to the musical stylings of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra). I wanted to attend them all, spending as much time downtown as possible, sitting in the sun with a tank top and shorts, watching goofy barefoot water-skiers fall off their six-man pyramids. Downtown Wichita is wonderful in a way that no city can perfect, and even though it’s a 15-minute drive from my house, it’s the only part of the city I miss painfully, because it was that vibrant taste of freedom and individuality always missing in suburban life.

Take a left out of my high school’s parking lot, follow Douglas St. under I-135. Pass the QuikTrip that served me a 98-cent mocha every morning before school. To the right stand the red brick warehouses that make up Old Town. I spent last summer working in Old Town Square, taking my lunchtime to call Northwestern friends while walking the puppies that commuted with their owners to the office. To the left is Wichita’s half-hearted attempt at skyscrapers — in my sophomore year, I watched the River Festival fireworks from the penthouse of our tallest building before racing my best friends down all 26 flights of stairs. The elevator had broken during the hour we were upstairs.

Cross the Arkansas River to Delano, historic Wichita, where local bands rented a skate park for concerts that one summer I pretended to be a scene kid. After shows we migrated to the Vagabond, the smoky little bar next door that let us sit in the back playing board games as the cooler kids finished their packs of cigarettes.

Come early May — May 8 this year — this little stretch of Douglas is transformed into the River Festival. A large outdoor food court pops up near my old office. The bridge over the Arkansas River is blocked off.

When I was at home, these little changes meant the most exciting time of the year was coming. The River Festival was about to begin. But because Northwestern is in session so late into summer, I’ll miss it this year and the next, and likely the years after that. My last memory of it, then, will be climbing up a hill on the west side of the river with blankets and sandwiches, cuddling into the blanket to fend off the last spring chills, and laying against the hill as the fireworks exploded above us. For an hour, we owned the city. We didn’t realize the city owned us — and wouldn’t let us escape its grasp quite that easily.

I can hate some of Wichita, with its strange, backward policies and hyper-Christian populace, but I can never fault downtown. As the River Festival approaches in spring, and I can only sit anxiously in the library awaiting one midterm or another, my throat clenches and my heart beats faster. It hurts me not to be home, just for those nine days.

The Medallion Hunt, which stopped running in 2001, is being revived this year with one small alteration: instead of hiding a real medallion, the Eagle will ask readers to name the location in Wichita where it is virtually “hidden” based on a series of clues. Were I home, I would resent this stupid change, as half the fun is the hunt. But since I live elsewhere now, I fully intend to take home the $3,000 I should have won 10 years ago.

The house from Home Alone. Photo by everfine on flickr, licensed under the Creative Commons.

Your childhood was in my hometown.

Your parents ignored you, your brother mocked you, and you wished you weren’t a part of your family. They even jetted off to France and forgot to bring you along! Luckily, you set up traps to protect the house from burglars and saved the day.

You ditched school and had the day of a lifetime. You went to the Art Institute, watched a Cubs’ game, sang in a parade, and got home in time to trick your parents into thinking you had been there all along.

Winnetka is the quintessential hometown. With the shores of Lake Michigan, the shaded streets sided with oaks and willows one hundred years old and the cute little shops in downtown, it is the perfect place for someone to grow up. And you have seen my hometown before in dozens of movies. And you’ve done all the things that I did growing up. Winnetka, located just fifteen minutes north of here on Sheridan, is the stereotype of a hometown with all the good and bad included.

I’ll give you a little background about the movies filmed in Winnetka. The infamous brick house in Home Alone is filmed on Lincoln Avenue, just about a mile from my house, with scenes in my local grocery store and elementary school. Although Home Alone is probably the most famous movie filmed there, the list goes on. Scenes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are filmed around Winnetka. Uncle Buck features New Trier High School, the public high school in my town. And if we extend a little bit outside of Winnetka to the surrounding suburbs, we would find many of the locations for Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Risky Business.

This probably doesn’t mean very much to you. So what if I live a mile from the house in which Kevin McCallister set up booby traps? But it’s not about these movies so much as it is about what they represent. All of those movies remind me of a time when things were simpler. When the adventure of a lifetime did seem like playing hooky for a day. When being left at home was the worst thing that could happen. When getting high with kids in detention could change your perspective on life.

I have done all the things they did in those movies. They represent my childhood, not just because I watched them, but because I experienced them. I will admit my parents didn’t actually forget my birthday, and I didn’t actually hire a hooker when my parents were out of town. But you get the picture. Think back to the time in your life when everything was simple. When you didn’t have to worry about summer jobs or grades or financial aid.

But everyone has to grow up. Everyone I know from Winnetka is ready to get out, and I think that feeling is only natural. You should want to experience the world. But that doesn’t mean that we need to forget about where we came from, either. Winnetka may not be your hometown, but the movies set there represent our childhood. Next time the stress of midterms is getting you down or the pressure to find a job has you at your wits end, take a break and watch Home Alone. Who knows, watching Kevin go sledding down the stairs might remind you that there’s a little bit of kid left in you after all.

Santa Cruz has a cousin.

Albeit a slightly older, chubbier cousin, but a relative nonetheless. A cousin more likely to be baking and getting baked on the beach than youthfully crashing through the waves. While a less shiny and fit model of its Californian counterpart, Bellingham, Washington is home to just as much peace, love and organic grocers.

Once an aegis of hippie sensibilities and the sock with Teva sandal, Bellingham is a city in flux. Change is washing slowly into the harbors. A tide of development creeps onto its shores in the early morning when no one’s around. On a recent trip home, I noticed newly plexiglassed and veneered buildings sprouting between the cracks of our well-loved sidewalks. In Fairhaven, a small neighborhood with park benches and used books, the once-decaying Waldron building had been revamped. It now housed a new bank and several expensive condominiums. Many said it was an effort to conserve the classic red brick architecture, to seal the Fairhaven charm in a mason jar of modernity. But I could taste the artificial preservatives.

The story has been told before: Small town loses small town charm when big developers and their big ideas build big buildings. But Bellingham is a unique case. Somewhere between the Saturday farmers’ market on Railroad Avenue and the newly opened Starbucks down the street mixes yuppie wealth with Hippie social consciousness. It’s this new breed, this newly formed “yippie” demographic, which threatens to consume my hometown like a fair-trade macchiato. They drive Subarus, sport body-conscious but eco-friendly yoga pants and can actually afford to shop at Whole Foods (while Bellingham has yet to welcome a Whole Foods, it can’t be far behind the Trader Joe’s that moved in recently). And with their gluten-casein-sodium-free, flax-fed children getting older, the movement is only growing. The yippies are becoming a true force.

But Bellingham is a town that can’t be lost to the black hole of Bed Bath and Beyond. It’s a colorful patchwork of people and personalities, not unlike the Mexican poncho my seventh-grade technology teacher wore on particularly windy days. Like the poncho’s nubby yarn and small tears, Bellingham’s authentic eccentricity is what makes it so comfortable and well worn. Home to the Pita Pit on the corner, where they often hot box the walk-in freezer, and will trade you a late-night sandwich for a spliff. Home to the man in a ski hat and backpack on the street corner, listening to a Walkman and spinning in circles. It’s a place of pacifists: my high school U.S. History teacher was a Vietnam leftover that didn’t make it quite as far as Canada when avoiding the draft. But when a Hummer drives down Railroad Avenue, be forewarned. Fingers in a peace sign also form the perfect cradle for a free-range egg—to be launched with a collection of choice expletives at the offending vehicle. Republican is a derogatory term. Right-wing voters were often hidden in the closet, not openly admitting their conservative orientation until they were in college and free from their oppressively liberal high school. Bush, Cheney, or “weapons of mass destruction” were my teachers’ favorite punch lines, sure to illicit appreciative laughs from an otherwise quiet classroom.

Most of this lies beneath the glossy surface. Visitors are more likely to hear of our stunning parks (it is the Pacific Northwest, after all), chalk-art festivals, Ski to Sea relays and vibrant dining scene. While such drug use, lunacy, and manic liberalism may not make the brochure, it’s integral to the true Bellingham. There’s a face of this town, beyond the child licking a Mallard’s ice cream cone on the cover. It’s the man in the ski hat, spinning with his arms wide open and his eyes tightly shut. Both welcomingly accepting and blissfully unaware.

Photo by Richard Castele.

Dear Cuyahoga River,

It must be tough to be you.

My parents remember June 1969, when you burst into flames. Or, technically, when an unknown spark ignited an odious soup of oil and detritus floating top of you. It was your 10th fire in a century. And even though the blaze smoldered for less than an hour, it earned Cleveland four decades of America’s disdain. Clevelanders lost a good deal of dignity and blamed you.

I don’t know how you handled it.

We bathed you in our oil, clothed you with our trash and fed you with our sewage. And then we burned you.

Clevelanders cringe when people bring up the fire. We don’t like to be reminded that our city was once so polluted that even the water could ignite. In fact, we dislike any reminder of those brutal two decades after 1960, when pollution spoiled our health, warring mobsters killed each other with car bombs and race riots exposed the city’s de facto segregation.

It seems we don’t even like to be reminded of Cleveland itself: people have been abandoning it for the past half-century. In 1950, nearly a million people lived within the city proper. Now, less than 500,000 do. People have fled south, east, and west, to the suburbs and beyond. The region’s heart deflated in America’s archetypical display of white flight.

Moving vans sped across bridges above you, ferrying people away to live nearer to your watery cousins. On the shores of the Rocky River and the Chagrin River, new communities blossomed and thrived, expanding every direction but inwards. People are trying to flee you.

The city was a foreign place to me until high school. It wasn’t your fault. You flowed on, oblivious to me anyways.

When I cross you on my bike or on a bus, I see a downtown drained of its energy. There are parking lots where there should be skyscrapers and hungry people sleeping on streets who deserve beds and meals. I work in a building that is gradually being abandoned. Its shops are suffocating, its patrons are leaving.

People say you smell bad.

We celebrated you once. You gave us the Flats, those blessed strips of land on your banks that we cultivated as a social center. Water taxies drove us across you from dance floor to bar, restaurant to concert. But we broke your trust. We let drunken fights and crime destroy your home. The Flats are abandoned now. You have no one to keep you company but the stunted trees perpetually seeking their own reflections in your water.

I’ve realized something, river. We are not invested in this city.

We may identify ourselves as Clevelanders when abroad, but for most of us, Cleveland is not home. Cleveland is where we arrive at nine and leave at five. Cleveland is the 11-o’clock news: failed schools, men and women jingling change cups. Cleveland is shootings and foreclosures and boarded-up windows. Cleveland is you, on fire.

Let me make you a promise. I’ll come back to you. I’ll work for you. Write for you. I’ll fight to clean you, to feed those who wander around you aimlessly. I’ll live near you. Every morning you will greet me when I wake, your murky smile almost reflecting a sunrise. I’d like to think of it as a misty glow.

It is well past 2 a.m. in Evanston. You and Cleveland are far away. I know you’re asleep now, rolling on a bed of putrefying mud, stirring only enough to tug on a blanket of fractured white ice.

Sleep well, river.

The residents of Plantation, Fla. are determined to prove that the calm suburb is a part of the South Florida retirement vacation your Jewish grandparents dream about. Acres of suburban neighborhoods are lined with unnatural palm trees and ever-growing strip malls (complete with brand-new Chabads and synagogues) where elderly couples hold up traffic as they hobble into Toojay’s Gourmet Deli to catch the early-bird special. Looking around, I would often think about how much better Chicago was going to be as I revved my car engine and listened to my friends assign point values to the crawling targets.

Apart from the infamous Florida retirees, growing up in Plantation was, in short, safe. Like most average towns, Plantation is just good enough to allow a generation of adults to bear a generation of children, many of whom will return to bear a generation of grandchildren. In retrospect, the simplicity was absent-mindedly beautiful. A person could never feel trapped by Plantation, as it is surrounded by the suburban limbs of Broward County on all sides — Sunrise, Davie, Cooper City, Coral Springs — and gave way to Fort Lauderdale to the north and Miami to the south. The beach was fifteen minutes away, and from there you could dream about sailing elsewhere, if only until it started to rain or your shoulders showed early signs of melanoma.

There was routine and expectation. I could dodge the police patrols and spend all night in one of the local parks; 24 Hour Fitness had a side door to sneak through since I wasn’t a gym member; and at least twenty of my friends were always at Sawgrass Mall, probably seeing the same movie as I was. The local sushi restaurant knew me by name, strangers’ backyards became makeshift film sets overnight, and Flamingo Road was the perfect place to hit 100 M.P.H.

On the surface, the town was an extension of 1980s Fort Lauderdale, a rapidly expanding network of neighborhoods, even after the housing crisis crippled buyers’ wallets, and a beacon of smarmy dads trying to sell you their legal services. Deep down within itself, however, Plantation was an easy place to grow up. It bubbled with — or more appropriately, complacently leaked — safe, comfortable, average American life.

My private high school ran itself like a business, routinely raising tuition behind a façade of creating a better learning environment. My headmaster would stand in front of the students and, at any event, succeed in sounding foolishly phony. (I became so keenly in tune to his mannerisms that, as I received my diploma at graduation, I succeeded in mimicking every one of his gestures in front of the audience – from his stooped handshake to his big, toothy smile. My high school didn’t like me too much.)

My sister, on the other hand, went to the local public school, a school that was truly a world apart from the private sector of affluent whites that attended my high school. Hers, like many in the Florida public school system, was overcrowded and understaffed. She often laughs about her first day of high school — my father was encouraging her to enjoy her first day when a young man was slammed onto the hood of the adjacent police car and was subsequently arrested. The cop pulled a small bag of cannabis out the boy’s pocket and dangled it in the sunlight for all of the other possible drug violators to see. She had a very successful high school career and now attends Smith College.

The income disparity within the South Florida town was most apparent when one ventured out of the colorful commercial centers and onto the fringes of Fort Lauderdale or Davie, where trailer parks waved Confederate flags and small, cramped homes housed many of the less fortunate in the area. Davie’s infamous ties to the Ku Klux Klan are still reminiscent in the old-south style building that line Davie Road, reminding you more of a dilapidated wild west amusement park than a wholesome neighborhood. When I arrived at Northwestern, I worried that the name of my hometown would raise some eyebrows — just to note, it was never an actual plantation.

But underneath all of this, a warm center exists. And that warm center is where the families of Plantation crowd around and grow, leaning on one another for help and doing what they can to benefit their community. It’s where the unique interests of an eclectic group of trendy teenagers, hardworking families, and elderly Jews come together to create a comfortable, safe environment where children like myself remain aloof to the harsh realities of growing up. Lamborghinis often speed by endless palm trees propped up by wooden planks, but you learn to ignore all of that. Living in Plantation has become synonymous with the routine trips from home to school to your local community center to the beach, when you stare off into the ocean thinking about how cold you could be only a thousand miles from home.