Forty years ago this week I moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. I remembered this as Earl and I drove home from our weekend visit to that city.
Forty years is a long time, and both the city and I have changed in the interim. I’m no longer the new bride of a second lieutenant stationed at Indianapolis’s Fort Benjamin Harrison. I’m no longer even married to that man, and the children we had together are now in their thirties. I have wrinkles, which I prefer to call smile lines. I have gray hair, although it’s not too prominent yet. And I lead a more quiet life than I did back then.
When I lived in Indianapolis, the city’s downtown had disintegrated into a block or two of retail stores with shambling buildings and a variety of monuments for neighbors. Malls and big box stores were just becoming fashionable, so fewer and fewer people ventured downtown. I went only to shop at L. S. Ayres, the local fashionable department store. And, on a soldier’s salary, I didn’t go often. We used to refer to the city as Indian No Place.
But while I’ve grown older, Indianapolis has grown younger. A variety of developers took the city under their collective wings in the 1970s and transformed it into a veritable beehive of activity. The downtown of my memory no longer exists. Instead, the city is alive with restaurants, two stadiums – one for a professional basketball team and the other for a professional football team, various museums, large office complexes, hotels, retail activity, restaurants, and more. The monuments are still there, but they have received a facelift, as if to be worthy of the renaissance that’s happening.
Friday and Saturday nights were filled with people of all ages and colors in the downtown district. It was as if someone were throwing a party and invited everyone within driving distance to come. And everyone did. The only sad note the entire time I was there was that L. S. Ayres announced it was closing its doors.
Even so, I believe Indianapolis and I are both happy to be where we are. I’m slowing down; the city isn’t. It was the other way around forty years ago.
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