Creative Aging: Returning to the Old Neighborhood

Editor’s note: Tenth in a series

In 1963, when my family moved from Chicago’s very Jewish Albany Park to Los Angeles’ very Jewish Fairfax area, I told my parents, “We just moved 2,000 miles to the exact same neighborhood.” Yet, I was no longer surrounded by my aunts, uncles, cousins, friends from birth, and all the people I was connected to because my parents grew up in Albany Park and knew everyone — and therefore so did my brother and I. 

In 1966, by the time I entered Fairfax High, I again knew everyone. In a post- World War II Jewish neighborhood of American-born parents, Holocaust survivors, public schools that were 90% Jewish, and lots of synagogues, everyone knew almost everything about everyone. 

By that time, I felt very Angeleno, very Fairfax. But I still felt very Chicagoan. 

Whenever I would return to Chicago during high school and college years, I still identified as a son of the city. Growing up in the early ’60s was a very different time in America. By the age of eight in Chicago, I was taking the city’s El Train and busses alone and with my friends, everywhere — downtown, Wrigley Field, to many different places. I’d ride my bike for miles. I knew the city and its streets and neighborhoods well. 

I found that the familiarity of my returns over the years wasn’t just physical. I knew the city’s personality, its people as well as the place. I also knew the Albany Park personality. Even though the Jewish residents had moved to northern neighborhoods and suburbs, they transported their Albany Park personalities with them and I could identify it immediately. I realized how much it was a part of me. I still have my best friend from childhood who remained in the city. We talk to each other all the time. 

Being in Chicago recently for a wedding, I had a chance to go back to Albany Park. The main streets and stores were different, now Latino, Korean and Arab. But the side streets felt exactly the same.  Every house, apartment building, every brick in every structure. 

Walking Albany Park, I could recapture memories of what happened in each place. There was a yellow brick building. I could see my 10-year-old self standing in front of it, fascinated,  watching workmen build it with concrete and then dig precise lines so they looked like bricks. That was 62 years ago. I wondered if anyone, except me, knows that those bricks are fake. The Tel Aviv Kosher Bakery had become the Middle Eastern Holy Land Bakery, and I laughed to myself, “See, they got some land back.”

In my return to Albany Park, I could recapture the feelings, senses and atmospheres of my youth, as if I left them hovering there waiting for me.  

In my return to Albany Park, I could recapture the feelings, senses and atmospheres of my youth as if I left them hovering there waiting for me.  I entered into the 1920’s main building of the neighborhood park where I went to day camp, to its public swimming pool  and where we sledded in the winter. The same red bricks. The same smells. The tall elm trees still embraced me in the way they did in my youth, and how they do in my dreams where I’m running through the neighborhood. 

From my parents’ many close friends, there was a family with three daughters, Bayla, Arlene and Ellen. Over the years, I maintained loose contact with them. Twenty years ago, I received a call from Bayla, telling me that Linny, my downstairs neighbor growing up, had just lost her son. So I called Linny, who I hadn’t spoken to since I was 12 years old. 

This week, Linny made dinner in honor of me being in Chicago, inviting over Bayla, Arlene and Ellen. Bayla, once a beautiful bathing suit model,  is now an Orthodox woman, showing up in modest dress and a wig.  Arlene and Ellen, more alternative, grandparenting together Arlene’s granddaughter. Linny and her husband, Jack, more traditional  retirees living in Skokie. 

There was so much to remember. So much warmth and connection. So much to say. No one hid anything about our lives’ pains or our celebrations. The interaction was so Albany Park, as the children of first generation blue collar working class Jews recovering from a war, who struggled economically, but knew how to build and maintain relationships.  Unlike our parents, we became college educated. But we all agreed we never forgot where we came from and how integral it still is to who we are today.

Gary Wexler woke up one morning and found he had morphed into an old Jewish guy.