The Baron Visits the Midwest Part II

Originally I was going to write one post about my trip to the Midwest, but I was telling two very different stories, so here is Part II of The Baron Visits the Midwest.

The second stop on my trip to the Midwest my mother and I traveled to Munster, IN, which is on the boarder of Illinois and a suburb of Chicago. I used to spend my summers in Munster growing up as a child. I would meet my cousin Jeff out there and we would spend two weeks with my Dad's Parents. We always had a lot of fun. The other day I tried to find my Grandparents old house, I made it to within a couple blocks before I decided to use the GPS. I found it and it still looks the same, I even found the house that used to have a For Sale sign in it forever because two people were murdered inside of it. I sat in my car across from the old house for a minute and all the memories I had of that house came flooding back. I remembered climbing the tree in the backyard with Jeff and my grandfather getting upset when we broke a branch or two along the way. I really wanted to walk around to the backyard and see if the old tree was still there. We used to set up the slip and slide in the back yard and play for hours. I remember my grandmother marking our height every summer along with my brother, sister, and other two cousins, I wonder if she replaced the paneling in the garage. One summer my grandfather let us work with him in his shop in the basement and we built wooden cars. The wheels were so out of alignment they wouldn’t move, but I still have those cars in a box somewhere because it was a lot of fun and it was the first time I was able to use power tools. My grandmother had picked up old bikes at garage sales so we had something to ride around on for the time we were at her house. My cousin and I would take them out in the street and get going as fast as we could and slam on the brakes to see who could leave the longest skid mark on the road. My grandfather would get upset because we would wear straight through the tires. Those bikes were great because all you had to do was slam the pedals backwards and it would engage the brake. Jeff and I used to play home run derby in the driveway, until my grandfather thought we were throwing the ball too hard and didn’t want us ruining the garage door.

Christmas's we would spend sleeping on air mattresses with all of our cousins in anticipation of Santa coming in the morning. There was a light in the basement that had a chain link wrapped around the chord and it was dangling in my face one night we were sleeping down there. I took the chord and laid it on the electrical outlet on the wall. I guess the plug wasn’t all the way in, because when the chord slipped off it sparked and everyone ran upstairs thinking a fire had started. There were all of the Christmas mornings spent in the living room opening gifts for hours; the stories that could be told from those mornings could fill a book. The last real memory was the winter my grandfather passed away, I was 11 years old and I remember my cousins, my brother, my sister, and I all had a huge snowball fight in the front yard, we went out front and started rolling huge snowballs and staked them next to each other to form fort walls. We filled in the gaps between to solidify the fort against stray snowballs. Then we started making snowballs to throw at each other and gathering them behind the fort walls. Before we started we split into teams of 3, so now we lay behind our forts ready to wage war on our family members. It was a blast, it was so much fun that 18 years later its one of the few memories I still have of this week.

The lady who lives in the house now was out front and I almost stopped to talk to her and tell her why I was driving down her cul-de-sac, but I decided the memories I had from that house were probably better then what I’d see if she let me see the place now, especially with a home improvement van parked in the driveway. So as I left I drove the circle we used to ride our bikes to the Little Store with my Grandma to get the paper every day. We were allowed to get a pack of baseball cards or candy each day. The old store is still there too. It’s surprising because a lot of things here are not still there, it’s been 15 years since I spent a summer here, and the mini golf/go kart place is closed with weeds growing over the track. It was surreal, because not only did that property look small to me, like how could this hold a go kart track and an 18 hole mini golf course, but the track itself was much smaller then I remembered. I told my Grandma about my exploration that afternoon and she said the place had trouble with the clientele it attracted. She also jokingly said they no longer had her money to pay the bills, we would go 3 or 4 times when we stayed with her.

The other night I asked my Grandma if we could go to Miner Dunn, it’s a Diner we used to go to every summer to get burgers and orange sorbet for dessert. She said it’s not worth going because the buns are stale and the burgers are not that good anymore. We ended up not going, and I’m a little disappointed, it would’ve been neat to go and see for myself if it had changed any.