Remembering Madison

When I lived in Madison, Wisconsin from 1993 through 1996, I was a pretty solitary guy. I had just graduated from Northwestern, bone-weary of academics and depressed over a breakup. I wasn't looking for challenges and a fast-track career. I was looking to hole up, lick my wounds, and experience living on my own terms for the first time in my life. Madison seemed perfect. It had the right balance of proximity and distance from my friends in Chicago and family in Omaha. It had the familiarity of a college campus, and the distraction of a young nightlife scene. It had beautiful lakeshore parks and cozy coffee shops -- poetic places for a loner to sit and read or write or think.

After I nailed an interview for a programming job in Madison, I wandered the town, identifying places where I would hang out. I already had it in mind that I would claim Madison as my own by haunting it, by making myself a part of its landscape. Living there, I was compulsive about doing exactly that. Most have nostalgic feelings about the places they shared with someone dear. I set out to engineer an anticipatory nostalgia about places I shared with my own self, a young man in his early 20s -- an age when melancholy and loneliness could still look romantic (so I thought) and not just sad. Standing on the little curved foot bridge in Tenny Park, overlooking the lily pads, I imagined myself as an older man, seeing the bridge and remembering... some wistful, romanticized bullshit, most likely.

Last weekend, my wife, brother-in-law, dog and I took a road trip to Madison. One of my fond, un-engineered Madison memories was of going to the annual Sun Prairie Sweet Corn Festival with office friends and gorging ourselves on sweet, sweet ears of corn, fresh out of the steamer. This trip was to re-vist that experience, and my family indulged me in other such re-visitations. Those who know me will not be surprised that most of them revolved around food. We ate at Ella's Deli, with the carousel out front and a riot of clockwork toys in every nook and cranny of the restaurant. We browsed the Dane County Farmers' Market around the capitol square, and bought my favorite spicy cheese bread from Stella's Bakery, along with some picnic-worthy produce and cheese. We stopped by the Memorial Union -- another old hangout -- to get Babcock's ice cream and frozen custard (my favorite is the orange custard with dark chocolate chips). We stopped by Smoky Jon's BBQ to pick up a couple of bottles of their terrific sauce. And thanks to my brother-in-law's research, we dined at a "new" restaurant, Harvest, where we made some new memories over a stunningly tasty farm-fresh meal with an outstanding Oregon Pinot Noir.

We also stopped by my old apartment building, and my wife remarked that we could hear birds chirping -- in our downtown condo, we mainly hear traffic and construction. We checked out my old office building too, nestled in a forested drive. The picnic table where we sometimes lunched was still there, but no trace remained of my first full-time employer. On the way to the capitol square, we passed Tenny Park and the foot bridge. It was as pretty as I remembered it, but there was no sudden rush of sentiment, no sense of prophesized nostalgia fulfilled. I have other, fonder memories of Madison, it seems. On our next trip, I'd like to go to one of the surviving small music clubs, where I saw bands like Green Day, Garbage, God Lives Underwater and Letters To Cleo. I'd like to have beers on the Union Terrace, and see if the "secret door" to the Barber's Closet still exists. I'd like my wife to see the interior of the capitol dome. And instead of just buying sauce, next time we must sit down to some Smoky Jon's 'cue. I'd like my next memories of Madison to be ones I share.