Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

204 Highland Court, Terre Haute

Terre Haute -- Next 2 Exits. "We take the second one. This looks the same, except now it looks like the middle of nowhere. It didn't look like that back then." Back then was 1972, '73, '74.

Dr. Cyborg and I pulled in at about 6:30 -- 5:30 local time. Indiana has some kind of funky time displacement where the state, or at least the part we were in, is in some other time zone on certain days of the year. We apparently got into town on one of the days that the time had changed to an hour earlier, but we didn't find that out until later.

After 6 hours of talk and listening to tunes from the early '70's to prep for the trip back in time, he got off I-70 at the Route 41 exit and did not hesitate in taking a left at the botom of the ramp. A sense of wonder streaked across his face as we turned a corner onto his old street. He knew the way. We didn't get lost. Things hadn't changed much. "The corn field still looks the same." He told stories, but not as fast as the memories flooded over him.

He showed me the exact spot where he and another kid got into a fight. "He slapped me in the face. I told him he slapped just like a girl. He tried to slap me again; so, I punched his lights out. Funny, the feeling that comes back."

He drove through the twisting roads of the neighborhood, which would have been upscale when he lived there during the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades with Frank-Lloyd-Wrightish design elements and rolling, treed yards. He pointed out where the girls lived, where his best friends lived, where his older brother's girlfriends lived, where he eluded the police on his Suzuki dirt bike and got it up to 67 miles per hour. I saw the Carmelite Monastery where he used to visit the nuns, talking to, but not being able to see them, through the black curtain. We drove through the secluded upscale area where the inventor of the Coca-Cola bottle built a huge mansion on the hill, complete with secret rooms and passages. The area was still upscale, with gated driveways and dirty looks.

We drove past the fairgrounds where his parents dropped him off to watch the sprint car races every Friday or Saturday night during the sumer months.

He remembered that it was a good time, a time of Little League, junior high school, dirt bikes, mostly dirt bikes, and girls. He nodded to the place where he and a girl made out for three hours ... "making out ... that was just kissing back then," he pointed out. "It was a different time."

And his face darkened when he talked about his mom being in and out of the hospital and going with his older brother to eat at Burger King most nights. And the sadness drained away as he talked about caddying at the country club to make some money so he could go to the pool in the afternoon to hang out with the girls.

He told me that a girl he last saw when he was in 8th grade tracked him down about four years back. She reached him at his office and wanted to get together when she and her husband came to Cleveland to run the marathon. They did. I told him that he should give her a call, but he said she was divorced and remarried and he didn't know her last name. And that wasn't the reason he came back -- he wanted to see the places, not the people.

And we did. He showed me the house she and her mother lived in.

And as darkness fell, we headed to downtown Terre Haute to check out Wabash Avenue, the main drag, where the locals gathered to ... socialize, and to get dinner with Mark and KT.

I thanked him again for asking me to be a part of it.

Dr. Cyborg turned to me, "Something tells me Houston is going to be changed a lot more than this."

Posted by Bill at September 14, 2003 02:55 AM