In which I wander my college town alone, several years later, and get all reflective ‘n’ stuff…

My feet slap the sun-baked pavement as I hop out of my father’s pickup truck and walk across the street to PJ’s Coffee & Tea Co. in downtown Hammond, Louisiana. In college, my friends and I hung out regularly at PJ’s (some of them even worked there at different times), and it was one of Kat’s and my regular haunts. It was a major set piece for that time of my life. 

The temperature is in the mid 80s, and as I breathe the humid air and swat away lovebugs, I am immediately transported to the countless times I walked this same path when I lived and studied in Hammond 4 ½ to 7 years ago. I’m even wearing the same pair of shorts. I order the same drink, an iced mocha (visits to PJ’s with Kat are why I became a coffee drinker), and sit down at my laptop. I remember the hundreds of mornings when I would roll out of bed, shuffle to PJ’s, and bring coffee back to the apartment for myself and Kat, who would just be waking up.

I used to see a constant stream of friends, professors, and acquaintances while sitting at PJ’s. Today, I recognize literally no one. This is partly a result of the natural order of things in a college town, partly a product of Hurricane Katrina.

Every place I go, every building I drive past, buries me in an avalanche of memories and connotations. I drive past old apartments now inhabited by strangers who have no knowledge of the events that once took place there, just as we were oblivious to those that came before us. Now, this is their Hammond. Soon, it’ll be someone else’s.

I drive to my old apartment on Thompson Road. That was the last apartment in which I took care of my mother, and was the first apartment where Kat started spending the night regularly enough that you could practically consider us cohabitating. In that apartment, I made the last minute decision not to move away to Illinois, but to stay in Louisiana, partly to finish school faster and more cheaply, but mostly to stay with Kat. I lived in that apartment during September 11th. I started wearing black Chuck Taylors while in that apartment.

I go to Wal*Mart, the one at which we used to shop, and I buy new sandals. This was the last place I was recognized in public by strangers. Two younger, female college students stopped me, because they enjoyed The Laramie Project, and nervously complimented my performance. I nervously thanked them. I wander past the bath and bedding aisles where Kat and I bought items to furnish our downtown apartment, our first official apartment together.

I go to the parking lot, put on the new sandals in the car, and listen to KSLU, the college radio station. Same voices, same shitty programming. Literally, many of the same songs from when I went to college. Whenever I’m back in Hammond, I listen to KSLU out of nostalgia, but always end up changing the station or inserting a CD very, very quickly. Today, however, as I leave Hammond on my way to Covington, KSLU plays Modest Mouse’s “Missed the Boat,” and I don’t think they could’ve played a more perfect song.

This rich microcosm that seemed too alive and too important to go away so unceremoniously and with so little fanfare or gravitas, disintegrated over several years, bit by undignified bit.

Perhaps I’m going through this now, because I’m confronting it all alone for the first time. Kat and I would visit Hammond, stay with our close friends (who’re now moving away to Arkansas), shop at their store (now closed), say, “Wow, how weird it is to go back to Hammond,” and then she and I would go home together and continue our path. Now, I’m just walking solo through the remains of a previous life, of which I now retain none, just as I had after my mother died, my parents divorced, my family moved, and so on.

Tonight, I had dinner on Mandeville’s lakefront with my family. It was good. I felt for a little while like I was on familiar ground, really back home.

Tomorrow morning, I extricate my possessions from Kat’s and load the U-Haul. I’ll sink my hands into the dirt and yank out my roots that I’ve planted so deeply in that other life. Since our relationship began, I’ve spent more nights in Kat’s parents’ house than with my own family. They became new constants in my life, and now, as with the other “constants” that I’ve always taken for granted, we’ll part ways.

My family is going out for a Mother’s Day dinner tomorrow night, and I hope that’ll be a good antidote to all this. Chances are, it’ll only serve as contrast, which will make things all the harder.

Well, I’m gonna go listen to The Cure.