It’s funny how attached you can become towards place without ever realizing it. Especially during graduate school, I knew that I loved the southern-most part of my home state of Illinois; however, I didn’t realize how strong that feeling really was until I had to leave quite abruptly in the height of the early C19 lockdowns.
In early March of 2020, I found out that I had been offered the fellowship position in Albuquerque. While I was ecstatic about the opportunity, it was tough to realize that I would be uprooting my life in Southern Illinois, possibly for good. During my undergraduate career, I didn’t really “live” in Southern Illinois, I lived as a student in Carbondale with little appreciation for the people and places that dotted the landscape outside of the campus bubble.
Over the course of my near 24 months living in Murphysboro, my small, fairly dilapidated apartment quickly began to feel like home and trips back to my first home, Rockford, made me realize that I truly had started my own life downstate. And so, when COVID hit and I completed the last real hurdle of graduate school - my thesis defense - I began to hurriedly pack up my apartment to move back to Rockford for several months prior to driving across the country, sigh-unseen to Albuquerque.
At that point, I was feeling the general anxiety of the time related to the pandemic and felt strongly about returning home to spend time with my immediate family and friends. It all felt quite existential. I’ll never regret those few months I had with my parents, brother, grandparents, and friends in Rockford; BUT, it always ate away at me how I left Southern Illinois: very few goodbyes, no final trips to my favorite spots and hangouts, and in the words of my former supervisor Robert, “it felt like we were running from the cops.”
I’m happy to report that I was able to, in some small way, finally make peace with my departure this past weekend while in my buddy Drew’s wedding. We started the trip with a visit to SIU where I was able to meet with my a majority of my former professors and talk about where my career has taken me thus far and my plans for the future. I was then able to run one of my favorite paths: SIU’s campus lake trail. I have either walked or run this path no less than 500 times during my 6 years at SIUC and I can’t remember a single time when someone said something to me while I was running. But, there’s a first for everything, and on Saturday, a woman I passed in the first few minutes of my run walking in the opposite direction said, upon seeing my again towards the end of my run, “geez man, you’re killing it!”
Then, after the wedding festivities were completed, Kallie and I stopped in Marion on our way out of town to meet with my former supervisor, Mike, who I am sure I’ll write more about in the future. In a bizarre chance encounter, while waiting for Mike in the parking lot, one of my former patients who I had treated with Mike pulled up in the parking spot across from me. Initially, I thought he was there to see Mike but found out that it was not so, he was there to meet his sister. Really, what are the chances that we all decided to go the same IHOP, on the same day, at the same time? And, if Mike had been there on time, there would have been a good chance we would have missed each other entirely.
All in all, I think the trip helped me to realize how far I’ve come in just a little over a year but also reminded me of what I love most about Southern Illinois: the people. Sitting here now, at my desk in Sun Prairie, I know that the ripples that were created during my formative years will just keep on ripplin’.
(Another interesting occurrence: last night, while walking Millie, I wore an old SLU sweatshirt. A couple stopped me and asked if I went to SLU and, through our conversation, I discovered that not only did they also attend SIU, but one was from Ava, a town only 20 minutes from Murphysboro. She even knew Kevin who owned the archery shop where I bought my compound.)