Familiar/Foreign
I.
Wafting out of the door of a busy laundromat in Albany Park I could smell the familiar fragrance of bleach and dryer sheets. I heard the soothing white noise of a newscast on a caged TV hanging from the wall and tumble of t-shirts and mismatched socks in a dryer. I instantly thought of home. The weekly trip that my mother and I would take to the laundromat was a familiar routine, one that I was happy to oblige in under the guise of a trip to the bagel shop next door and the pinball machine in the corner. I hadn’t thought of that laundromat in years and yet that specific combination of smells and sounds transported me back to a time I didn’t even know I remembered.
II.
The Troy Public Library was my home away from home. There was a ritual to my almost daily sojourn to the Public Library, by my mom’s powder blue mini van, by bike when I was old enough to go alone, by my cherished 2014 Jeep Cherokee (Cherry Red.) It’s where I read my first chapter book, cemented my love for the PBS show Arthur by renting his Christmas episode on VHS even in the dead of July, where I wrote my college essays, studied with a boy I liked. I love libraries. I especially love when people love libraries as much as I love libraries.
III.
I loved movies. I still do but not like I did when I was 4 or 5, when the magic of it was raw. I would wake up and immediately put in my well-worn VHS of The Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t even a real VHS, it was a recording from the one time it was broadcasted on PBS. Half of a Ken Burns documentary was taped over afterwards. I had every commercial break memorized. I would hum “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in my sleep. I had a pair of ruby slippers that were a half size too small but would wear until my feet ache. I thought of those shoes when we walked through Oz Park the first day. How the magic of The Wizard of Oz was still as fresh and new to the kids playing on the playground nearby as it was for me.
IV.
The human experience is infinite. There a millions of people in the world all with vastly different backgrounds and life stories, ones we will never know or understand. Yet there is comfort that in a world so divided by oceans and ideologies there are slivers of truth that we all can relate to. Walking past that Albany Park laundromat or the local libraries or the different parks, I thought about how many other people had occupied this space and made it into a memory. How many other people had turned this place into more than just a place, like I had done with the places of my childhood. How they had their own set of memories and deep feelings toward the places that were foreign yet familiar to me. We talked a lot in class about how while walking we were “laying down a thread.” Walking down the streets this week I was more able than ever to see how the threads I was laying down were more entangled with others than I ever thought before.
