The Summer Project: The neighborhood walk, the classic cassette (1996)

I've always had a nostalgic streak -- that should be obvious from my blog, even from this post. I know in 1984, I became memory-dreamy for the summer of 1981 ... which was only three years earlier. Three years seemed like an eternity back then, but I know now that it's just a blip.

By 1996, the memories were stretched further away, and the urge to write about those memories grew stronger. One cassette brought it all to the forefront.

Lori and I were living our first summer in Madison together in 1996, in an apartment complex way on the far west side of the city. For exercise, if I wasn't at the health club we belonged to, I would go for walks in the neighborhoods around our apartment complex. Sometimes, I would just walk the immediate neighborhood or the trails at nearby Elver Park, but for longer walks, I would cross Gammon Road and wander through the blocks and blocks of 1950s residential and almost suburban Madison.

The expanded neighborhoods didn't necessarily remind me of my neighborhoods in Chicago, but something about the walks made them appealing. Perhaps because they felt a little suburban, like Glenview or Morton Grove. There were a lot of open green spaces for drainage that trails wound through, with little parks hidden along the way. There was always a street that I had never walked down -- some route to bring a little bit of a unique experience to each walk.

Plus, in Madison, and especially that summer before we had a computer and the internet, I had plenty of time. I would get home from work at noon or 1 p.m., and with Lori working normal hours, I had all afternoon to either nap, play video games, lounge by the apartment complex's pool, or exercise -- or some combination thereof. So, a longer walk wasn't out of the ordinary, and I'm realizing via a mapping website that 5- or 6-mile walks weren't unusual.

Walking with music was as important then as it was in my youth and is today. My collection of mix tapes grew seemingly exponentially in Madison, often to give me the variety I sought with my varied walks. I also still owned at least 100 tapes of songs taped off the radio stretching back to 1982. Some of these were still in rotation, but many of the older, cheaper tapes didn't get in the Walkman too often. I don't know if I stopped appreciating the old radio tapes or if, with CDs, I could tailor cassettes to what I wanted to hear, without any fast forwarding.

This particular day, I went for a walk later in the afternoon. I wonder now if it was a weekend and I just felt like getting out, because I remember telling Lori of my experience when I arrived back at home. I took a route down Schroeder Road, thorough a trail and some green space, and into the Greentree neighborhood.

The tape in the Walkman that day was from 1984 -- songs off of WLS and G106 recorded to a red Kmart 90-minute cassette that was from a six-pack that my grandmother had bought me. Surprisingly, the songs were coming in somewhat decent stereo considering the cassette was cheap and I wasn't exactly wearing expensive headphones.

I wasn't sure when I had previously listened to that cassette -- it could have been a decade -- but it was a revelation. The neighborhood I was walking through suddenly felt .. embracing. The memories flooded back. And I came home full of inspiration, ready to write, tell stories, and remember.

Twenty-four years have passed since that day. My grand plans to write have ebbed and flowed. The project I devised at that time for a book of summer memories never got beyond four stories.

Twenty-four years later, I've written a book via NanoWriMo, tried a few others, and penned more than a thousand blog posts -- not to mention all the work writing I've created over the decades. I've converted all the old tapes to MP3 format, so I can listen to them whenever I want. I walk or run through my Salt Lake City neighborhood where I've lived for 17 years, yet feel a surge of energy on a block I haven't previously traversed (and some of it reminds me of that Madison neighborhood ...).

So, all these summers later, did I fulfill the inspiration and potential I felt that day with the Kmart tape saturating and nurturing my ears? Or have I fallen short?

After watching "Hamilton" for the first time last weekend, a lyric resonated, and though it's a little out of context, I can't stop thinking about it four months before I turn 50:

"How do you write like you're running out of time?"

I think I was feeling that in 1996. I know I'm feeling it in 2020.